The law of debt produced a revolution. Had the senate and the patricians understood how to act wisely, and divided the opposite party, a thing so easily done in free states, the patricians were superior to the plebeians, not indeed in numbers, but in many other respects. For the patricians had almost exclusively the clientship. Livy and Dionysius have many passages from which it is evident how numerous the clients were during the first centuries; that the patricians distributed the demesne in many little hides of land among them; and that they kept them entirely in their power. These clients were not in the tribes; but they were connected through their patrons with the curies: hereditary landed property they only possessed by the special permission of their masters, what we would now call a quit rent. Thus they were absolutely dependent on the patricians. But the plebeians consisted of altogether different elements, of Latin knights, rich men, and a host of quite poor people: they were either proprietors or day-labourers. These different elements might very easily have been divided; the principal men were ambitious of offices and of political consideration; the common people, on the contrary, did not care at all whether their chiefs were admissible to consular dignity or not, but so much the more did they for other things. In the absence of patriotism and justice, the patricians must have been able easily to sever the mass from the principal plebeians. But they were as covetous as they were ambitious, and thus pressed doubly upon the people. The whole of the demesne was in their occupation. Had they assigned small possessions to the poor, or given them a right of ownership, then they would have gained them over; and separated them from the rest. Yet as they had the money trade entirely in their own hands, they deemed themselves sufficiently secure. The money trade no doubt was so managed, that the banking business was transacted by foreigners or freedmen under the patronage of a patrician, as in Athens by Pasion, who was a Metic, and paid an Athenian for lending his name to the firm.[90] As in Athens the Trapezitæ, in medieval Italy the Lombards, in our days the Jews, all of whom have no real home, carry on the money trade. And thus the poor plebeian often applied for loans to his neighbour, yet more generally he was obliged to go to town, and to fetch the money from the Trapezitæ.