It is a grave error to suppose that a law that surveys all things evenly and without being influenced by political and economic interests can exist at all. Such a state of things can be pictured, and is always being pictured, by those who suppose that the imagining of political possibilities is a political activity. But nothing alters the fact that such a law, born of abstractions, does not exist in real history. Always the law contains in abstract form the world-picture of its author, and every historical world-picture contains a political-economic _tendency_ dependent, not upon what this man or that thinks, but upon what is practically intended by the class which in fact commands the power and, with it, the legislation. Every law is established by a class in the name of the generality. Anatole France once said that “our law in majestic equality forbids the rich no less than the poor to steal bread and to beg in the street.”[76] A one-sided justice no doubt. But equally the other side will always try to win sole authority for laws derived from _its_ outlook upon life. These legislative codes are one and all political acts, and party-political acts at that--in the case of Solon a democratic constitution (πολιτεία) combined with private laws (νομοί) of the same stamp, in that of Dracon and the Decemvirs[77] an oligarchic constitution fortified by private law. It was left to Western historians, accustomed to their own durable law, to undervalue the importance of this connexion; Classical man was under no misapprehension as to what really happened in these cases. The product of the Decemvirs was in Rome the last code of purely patrician character. Tacitus calls it the end of right law (“_finis æqui juris_,” _Annals_, III, 27). For, just as the fall of the Decemvirs was followed very significantly by the rise of another Ten, the Tribunes, so immediately the _jus_ of the Twelve Tables and the constitution on which it was founded began to be attacked by the undermining process of the _lex rogata_ (people’s law), which set itself with Roman constancy to do what Solon had achieved in one act in the case of Dracon’s work, the πατρίος πολιτεία which was the law-ideal of the Attic oligarchy. Thenceforward Dracon and Solon were the “slogans” in the long battle between Oligarchy and Demos, which in Rome meant Senate and Tribunate. The Spartan constitution associated with the name “Lycurgus” not only stood for the ideal of Dracon and the Twelve Tables, but concreted it. We can see, parallel with the closely related course of events in Rome, the tendency of the two Spartan kings to evolve from the condition of Tarquinian tyrants to that of tribunes of the Gracchan kind; the fall of the last Tarquins or the institution of the Decemvirs--a _coup d’état_ of one kind or another against the tribunician tendency[78]--corresponds more or less to the fall of Cleomenes (488) and of Pausanias (470); and the revolution of Agis III