limits a conception of such facts is the true and proper object of
narration, which is so much the clearer, more vivid and more exact, as
it takes the form of a monograph; witness Thucydides in the
Peloponnesian war.

Society already evolved in a certain fashion, society already arrived at
a certain degree of development, society already so complicated that it
conceals the economic substructure which supports all the rest, has not
revealed itself to the simple narrators, except in these visible facts,
in these most apparent results, and in these most significant symptoms
which are the political forms, the legal dispositions and the partisan
passions. The narrator, both because he lacks any theoretical doctrine
regarding the true sources of the historic movement, and by the very
attitude which he takes on the subject of the things which he unites
according to the appearances which they have come to assume, cannot
reduce them to unity, unless it be as a result of a single, immediate
intuition, and if he is an artist, this intuition takes on a color in
his mind and transforms itself there into dramatic action. His task is
finished if he succeeds in massing a certain number of facts and events
in certain limits and confines over which the observer may look as on a
clear perspective; in the same way, purely descriptive geography has
accomplished its task, if it sums up in a vivid and clear design a
concourse of physical causes which determine the immediate aspect of
the Gulf of Naples, for example, without going back to its genesis.

It is in this need of graphic narration that arises the first intuitive,
palpable, and, I might almost say, aesthetic and artistic occasion for
all those abstractions and those generalizations, which are finally
summed up in the semi-doctrine of the so-called factors.

Here are two notable men, the Gracchi, who wished to put an end to the
process of appropriation of the public land and to prevent the
agglomeration of the _latifundium_, which was diminishing or causing to
completely disappear the class of small proprietors, that is to say, of
the free men, who are the foundation and the condition of the democratic
life of the ancient city. What were the causes of their failure? Their
aim is clear, their spirit, their origin, their character, their heroism
are manifest. They have against them other men with other interests and
with other designs. The struggle appears to the mind at first merely a