The idea of the law being constantly directed to counteract the tendencies to violent inequalities in material possessions among different members of a society, is too vague to be criticised. Does it cover and warrant so sweeping a measure as the old _seisachtheia_ of Solon, voiding all contracts in which the debtor had pledged his land or his person; or such measures as the agrarian laws of Licinius and the Gracchi? Or is it to go no further than to condemn such a law as that which in England gives unwilled lands to the eldest son? We can only criticise accurately a general idea of this sort in connection with specific projects in which it is applied. As it stands, it is no more than the expression of what the author thinks a wise principle of public policy. It assumes the existence of property just as completely as the theory of the most rigorous capitalist could do; it gives no encouragement, as the Discourse did, to the notion of an equality in being without property. There is no element of communism in a principle so stated, but it suggests a social idea, based on the moral claim of men to have equality of opportunity. This ideal stamped itself on the minds of Robespierre and the other revolutionary leaders, and led to practical results in the sale of the Church and other lands in small lots, so as to give the peasant a market to buy in. The effect of the economic change thus introduced happened to work in the direction in which Rousseau pointed, for it is now known that the most remarkable and most permanent of the consequences of the revolution in the ownership of land was the erection, between the two extreme classes of proprietors, of an immense body of middle-class freeholders. This state is not equality, but gradation, and there is undoubtedly an immense difference between the two. Still its origin is an illustration on the largest scale in history of the force of legislation being exerted to counteract an irregularity that had become unbearable.[178]