point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of
ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical
situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing
wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.
In the Athens of 594 B.C., according to Plutarch [Plutarch (46?-?120)],
“the disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor had reached its
height, so that the city seemed to be in a dangerous condition, and no other
means for freeing it from disturbances… seemed possible but despotic
power.”
The poor, finding their status worsened with each year–the
government in the hands of their masters, and the corrupt courts deciding
every issue against them–began to talk of violent revolt. The rich, angry at
the challenge to their property, prepared to defend themselves by force.
Good sense prevailed; moderate elements secured the election of Solon, a
businessman of aristocratic lineage, to the supreme archonship. He
devaluated the currency, thereby easing the burden of all debtors (though he
himself was a creditor); he reduced all personal debts, and ended
imprisonment for debt; he canceled arrears for taxes and mortgage interest;
he established a graduated income tax that made the rich pay at a rate
twelve times that required of the poor; he reorganized the courts on a more
popular basis; and he arranged that the sons of those who had died in war
for Athens should be brought up and educated at the government’s expense.
The rich protested that his measures were outright confiscation; the radicals
complained that he had not redivided the land; but within a generation
almost all agreed that his reforms had saved Athens from revolution.
The Roman Senate, so famous for its wisdom, adopted an
uncompromising course when the concentration of wealth approached an
explosive point in Italy; the result was a hundred years of class and civil
war. Tiberius Gracchus [Gracchus, Tiberius Sempronius (162?-133 B.C.)],
an aristocrat elected as tribune of the people, proposed to redistribute land
by limiting ownership to 333 acres per person, and alloting surplus land to
the restive proletariat of the capital. The Senate rejected his proposals as
