Solon, beginning his legislative
mission by a general abolition of debts, and creating rights and
reserves,--that is, barriers to prevent their return,--was
no less reactionary. Lycurgus went farther; he forbade
individual possession, and tried to absorb the man in the State,
annihilating liberty the better to preserve equilibrium. Hobbes,
deriving, and with great reason, legislation from the state of
war, arrived by another road at the establishment of equality
upon an exception,--despotism. His book, so much calumniated, is
only a development of this famous antithesis. The charter of
1830, consecrating the insurrection made in '89 by the plebeians
against the nobility, and decreeing the abstract equality of
persons before the law, in spite of the real inequality of powers
and talents which is the veritable basis of the social system now
in force, is also but a protest of society in favor of the poor
against the rich, of the small against the great. All the laws
of the human race regarding sale, purchase, hire, property,
loans, mortgages, prescription, inheritance, donation, wills,
wives' dowries, minority, guardianship, etc.
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