The latter course was probably the most common as well as the most pernicious; for while utter ruin might thereby be averted from the individual, this precarious position of the farmer, dependent at all times on the mercy of his creditor--a position in which he knew nothing of property but its burdens--threatened to demoralise and politically to annihilate the whole farmer-class.

The intention of the legislator, when instead of mortgaging he prescribed the immediate transfer of the property to the creditor with a view to prevent insolvency and to devolve the burdens of the state on the real holders of the soil,( 3) was evaded by the rigorous system of personal credit, which might be very suitable for merchants, but ruined the farmers.

The free divisibility of the soil always involved the risk of an insolvent agricultural proletariate; and under such circumstances, when all burdens were increasing and all means of deliverance were foreclosed, distress and despair could not but spread with fearful rapidity among the agricultural middle class.
Relations of the Social Question to the Question between Orders The distinction between rich and poor, which arose out of these relations, by no means coincided with that between the clans and the plebeians.

If far the greater part of the patricians were wealthy landholders, opulent and considerable families were, of course, not wanting among the plebeians; and as the senate, which even then perhaps consisted in greater part of plebeians, had assumed the superintendence of the finances to the exclusion even of the patrician magistrates, it was natural that all those economic advantages, for which the political privileges of the nobility were abused, should go to the benefit of the wealthy collectively; and the pressure fell the more heavily upon the commons, since those who were the ablest and the most capable of resistance were by their admission to the senate transferred from the class of the oppressed to the ranks of the oppressors.
But this state of things prevented the political position of the aristocracy from being permanently tenable.

Had it possessed the self-control to govern justly and to protect the middle class--as individual consuls from its ranks endeavoured, but from the reduced position of the magistracy were unable effectually, to do--it might have long maintained itself in sole possession of the offices of state.