The pressure of these conditions plunged the greater part of the poorer leaseholders heavily in debt. The legal rate of interest was enormously high, considering the pecuniary shortage that prevailed--so high that it was welcomed by the plebeians as a great relief when later (probably 357 B.C.) the maximum was reduced to 8⅓ or 10 per cent. In case of failure to pay the interest on a debt, the accumulated interest was added to the original debt until the amount owed was increased to an overwhelming figure. It was a menace to the internal peace of the country that the creditors of the peasants were usually their patrician neighbours who, as capitalists, were the only ones in a position to lend. Analogous to the course pursued in Attica a century before, the Roman manor lords were now about to make the situation of the plebs one of economic dependence upon themselves. Hence in Rome, as in Attica, the first attack of the common people on the patrician classes was made on the ground of the extreme harshness of the Roman laws governing debt, framed, as they were, by a race which knew no mercy where its material interests were concerned. Sometimes the creditor, into whose hands the law gave complete possession of the person and property of the debtor, left this latter in nominal control and occupation of his land only to oppress him still further by demands for rent. To this arrangement the debtor frequently preferred taking advantage of the _nexum_, or usual form of loan contract under which he could place himself in bondage to the creditor to serve him as many years as were required to liquidate the debt, or until the creditor actually sold him as a slave in a foreign land. [Illustration: ROMAN PEASANT (After Racinet)] It is no wonder that out of conditions so one-sided and oppressive, the deepest aversion should have arisen among the plebeians against the patrician rule. There were, indeed, some among the noble families who sought to establish better and more conciliatory relations between themselves and the lower people, notably the Valerii and the Horatii; but for the most part the patricians of those days were characterised by the harshest egotism and imperiousness. These qualities were particularly conspicuous in the Sabine Fabii, in the newly settled family of Appius Claudius,--who later displayed a certain eccentricity in good as well as evil that belied the usual conservative traits of the aristocracy,--and in the Quinctii and Manlii, who were the acknowledged supporters of a sort of iron military discipline to be applied in their relations with the lower classes. From all this it will be seen that only by a movement bordering on a general revolution could a new political adjustment be brought about that would insure an amendment in the social condition of the plebeians. [Sidenote: [495-457 B.C.]]