88 Labour. Land-monopoly 



parts independent peoples, backward in civilization, lived a free rustic 

 life of a largely pastoral character. Others again devoted themselves 

 more to the tillage of the soil, with or without the help of slaves. It 

 was known that in earlier times a population of this kind in Attica 

 had long existed, and that after the unification of Attica and the re- 

 forms of Solon it had for a time been the backbone of the Athenian 

 state. But in fertile lowland districts there was a not unnatural tendency 

 towards larger estates, worked by hireling or slave-labour. It seems 

 fairly certain that in Attica before the time of Aristotle the supply of 

 free wage-earners for farm-work was failing: the development of the 

 city and the Peiraeus, and the growing number of those in receipt of 

 civil and military pay, had drawn the poor citizen away from rustic 

 labour. Nor is there reason to think that after the loss of empire there 

 was any marked movement back to the land on the part of free labourers 

 or even small farmers. It would rather seem that Attic land was passing 

 into fewer hands, and that the employment of stewards or overseers, 

 free or slave, was one of the features of a change by which the farming 

 of land was becoming a symptom of considerable wealth. 



But beside the decision as to labour there was the question as to a 

 means of checking land-monopoly. Such monopoly, resulting in the 

 formation of a discontented urban mob, was a serious menace to the 

 stability of a constitution. For all poor citizens to get a living by 

 handicrafts was perhaps hardly possible; nor would the life of an 

 artisan suit the tastes and wishes of all. Nature does (or seems to do) 

 more for the farmer on his holding than for the artisan in his workshop, 

 and the claim to a share of the land within the boundaries of their 

 states had led to seditions and revolutions, ruinous and bloody, followed 

 by ill feeling, and ever liable to recur. Colonial states, in which the 

 first settlers usually allotted the land (or most of it) among themselves 

 and handed down their allotments to their children, were particularly 

 exposed to troubles of this kind. The various fortunes of families, and 

 the coming of new settlers, early raised the land-question there in an 

 acute form, as notoriously at Syracuse. No wonder that practical and 

 theoretical statesmen tried to find remedies for a manifest political 

 evil. Stability was only to be assured by internal peace. To this end 

 two main lines of policy 1 found favour. Security of tenure was pro- 

 moted by forbidding the sale of land-lots or making it difficult to 

 encumber them by mortgages: while the prohibition of excessive 

 acquisition* was a means of checking land-grabbers and interesting a 

 larger number of citizens in the maintenance of the land-system. But 



1 Pol VI 4 8-10. 



2 We have a modern analogue in the recent legislative measures in New Zealand and 

 Australia, not to speak of movements nearer home. 



