r, which in this conflict--wherein
neither side had any military reserve--acted, as it were, the part of an
army. It was clear that the senate was not powerful enough to wrest
either from the merchants or from the proletariat their new privileges;
any attempt to assail the corn laws or the new jury arrangement would
have led under a somewhat grosser or somewhat more civilized form to a
street riot, in presence of which the senate was utterly defenceless.
But it was no less clear that Gracchus himself and these merchants and
proletarians were only kept together by mutual advantage, and that the
men of material interests were ready to accept their posts, and the
populace, strictly so called, its bread, quite as well from any other as
from Caius Gracchus.

The institutions of Gracchus stood, for the moment at least, immovably
firm, with the exception of a single one--his own supremacy. The
weakness of the latter lay in the fact that in the constitution of
Gracchus there was no relation of allegiance subsisting at all between
the chief and the army; and, while the new constitution possessed all
other elements of vitality, it lacked one--the moral tie between ruler
and ruled, without which every state rests on a pedestal of clay. In the
rejection of the proposal to admit the Latins to the franchise it had
been demonstrated with decisive clearness that the multitude in fact
never voted for Gracchus, but always simply for itself. The aristocracy
conceived the plan of offering battle to the author of the corn
largesses and land assignations on his own ground.

As a matter of course the senate offered to the proletariat not merely
the same advantages as Gracchus had already assured to it in corn and
otherwise, but advantages still greater. Commissioned by the senate, the
tribune of the people, Marcus Livius Drusus, proposed to relieve those
who received land under the laws of Gracchus from the rent imposed on
them, and to declare their allotments to be free and alienable property;
and, further, to provide for the proletariat not in transmarine, but in
twelve Italian, colonies, each of three thousand colonists, for the
planting of which the people might nominate suitable men; only Drusus
himself declined--in contrast with the family complexion of the Gracchan
commission--to take part in this honorable duty. Presumably the Latins
were named as those who would have to bear the costs of the plan, for
there does not appear to have e