[78]
But they who pose as friends of the people, and1
who for that reason either attempt to have agrarian
laws passed, in order that the occupants may be
driven out of their homes, or propose that money
[p. 255]
loaned should be remitted to the borrowers, are
undermining the foundations of the commonwealth:
first of all, they are destroying harmony, which
cannot exist when money is taken away from one
party and bestowed upon another; and second, they
do away with equity, which is utterly subverted, if
the rights of property are not respected. For, as I
said above, it is the peculiar function of the state
and the city to guarantee to every man the free and
undisturbed control of his own particular property.
1 The menace of agrarian laws.
M. Tullius Cicero. De Officiis. With An English Translation. Walter Miller. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1913.
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