At Athens the more favorable point of view prevailed throughout all the historical times.  The march of industry and commerce, under the mitigated law which prevailed subsequently to Solon, had been sufficient to bring it about at a very early period and to suppress all public antipathy against lenders at interest.  We may remark, too, that this more equitable tone of opinion grew up spontaneously, without any legal restriction on the rate of interest—­no such restriction having ever been imposed and the rate being expressly declared free by a law ascribed to Solon himself.  The same may probably be said of the communities of Greece generally—­at least there is no information to make us suppose the contrary.  But the feeling against lending money at interest remained in the bosoms of the philosophical men long after it had ceased to form a part of the practical morality of the citizens, and long after it had ceased to be justified by the appearances of the case as at first it really had been.  Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Plutarch, treat the practice as a branch of the commercial and money-getting spirit which they are anxious to discourage; and one consequence of this was that they were, less disposed to contend strenuously for the inviolability of existing money-contracts.  The conservative feeling on this point was stronger among the mass than among the philosophers.  Plato even complains of it as inconveniently preponderant, and as arresting the legislator in all comprehensive projects of reform.  For the most part, indeed, schemes of cancelling debts and redividing lands were never thought of except by men of desperate and selfish ambition, who made them stepping-stones to despotic power.  Such men were denounced alike by the practical sense of the community and by the speculative thinkers:  but when we turn to the case of the Spartan king, Agis III, who proposed a complete extinction of debts and an equal redivision of the landed property of the state, not with any selfish or personal views, but upon pure ideas of patriotism, well or ill understood, and for the purpose of renovating the lost ascendancy of Sparta—­we find Plutarch expressing the most unqualified admiration of this young king and his projects, and treating the opposition made to him as originating in no better feelings than meanness and cupidity.  The philosophical thinkers on politics conceived—­and to a great degree justly, as I shall show hereafter—­that the conditions of security, in the ancient world, imposed upon the citizens generally the absolute necessity of keeping up a military spirit and willingness to brave at all times personal hardship and discomfort:  so that increase of wealth, on account of the habits of self-indulgence which it commonly introduces, was regarded by them with more or less of disfavor.  If in their estimation any Grecian community had become corrupt, they were willing to sanction great interference with preexisting rights for the purpose of bringing it back nearer to their ideal standard.  And the real security for the maintenance of these rights lay in the conservative feelings of the citizens generally, much more than in the opinions which superior minds imbibed from the philosophers.