e minds of its contemporaries and protected its creations;
the fostering and cherishing at least of the interests of the populace
was in fact perfectly compatible with the personal advantage of
the aristocracy, and thereby nothing further was sacrificed than
merely the public weal.

The Domain Question under the Restoration

All those measures which were devised by Gaius Gracchus for the
promotion of the public welfare--the best but, as may readily be
conceived, also the most unpopular part of his legislation--were
allowed by the aristocracy to drop. Nothing was so speedily and so
successfully assailed as the noblest of his projects, the scheme of
introducing a legal equality first between the Roman burgesses and
Italy, and thereafter between Italy and the provinces, and--inasmuch
as the distinction between the merely ruling and consuming and the
merely serving and working members of the state was thus done away--
at the same time solving the social question by the most comprehensive
and systematic emigration known in history. With all the determination
and all the peevish obstinacy of dotage the restored oligarchy
obtruded the principle of deceased generations--that Italy must
remain the ruling land and Rome the ruling city in Italy--afresh
on the present. Even in the lifetime of Gracchus the claims of
the Italian allies had been decidedly rejected, and the great idea of
transmarine colonization had been subjected to a very serious attack,
which became the immediate cause of Gracchus' fall. After his
death the scheme of restoring Carthage was set aside with little
difficulty by the government party, although the individual allotments
already distributed there were left to the recipients. It is true
that they could not prevent a similar foundation by the democratic
party from succeeding at another point: in the course of the conquests
beyond the Alps which Marcus Flaccus had begun, the colony of Narbo
(Narbonne) was founded there in 636, the oldest transmarine burgess-
city in the Roman empire, which, in spite of manifold attacks by the
government party and in spite of a proposal directly made by the
senate to abolish it, permanently held its ground, protected, as it
probably was, by the mercantile interests that were concerned. But,
apart from this exception--in its isolation not very important--the
government was uniformly successful in preventing the assignation
of land out of Italy.

The Italian domain-que