that these objections to the Sempronian agrarian
law were of no small weight. Yet they are not decisive. Such a
practical eviction of the holders of the domains was certainly a
great evil; yet it was the only means of checking, at least for a
long time, an evil much greater still and in fact directly destructive
to the state--the decline of the Italian farmer-class. We can well
understand therefore why the most distinguished and patriotic men
even of the conservative party, headed by Gaius Laelius and Scipio
Aemilianus, approved and desired the distribution of the domains
viewed in itself.

The Domain Question before the Burgesses

But, if the aim of Tiberius Gracchus probably appeared to
the great majority of the discerning friends of their country
good and salutary, the method which he adopted, on the other hand,
did not and could not meet with the approval of a single man of note
and of patriotism. Rome about this period was governed by the senate.
Any one who carried a measure of administration against the majority
of the senate made a revolution. It was revolution against the spirit
of the constitution, when Gracchus submitted the domain question to the
people; and revolution also against the letter, when he destroyed not
only for the moment but for all time coming the tribunician veto--
the corrective of the state machine, through which the senate
constitutionally got rid of interferences with its government--by the
deposition of his colleague, which he justified with unworthy sophistry.
But it was not in this step that the moral and political mistake of
the action of Gracchus lay. There are no set forms of high treason
in history; whoever provokes one power in the state to conflict with
another is certainly a revolutionist, but he may be at the same time
a discerning and praiseworthy statesman. The essential defect of the
Gracchan revolution lay in a fact only too frequently overlooked--in
the nature of the then existing burgess-assemblies. The agrarian law
of Spurius Cassius(35) and that of Tiberius Gracchus had in the main
the same tenor and the same object; but the enterprises of the two
men were as different, as the former Roman burgess-body which shared
the Volscian spoil with the Latins and Hernici was different from
the present which erected the provinces of Asia and Africa. The former
was an urban community, which could meet together and act together;
the latter was a great state, as to which