em to declare his colleague
deposed. They had warmed to the fight, and complied. A more experienced
statesman would have known that established constitutional bulwarks
cannot be swept away by a momentary vote. He obtained his Agrarian law.
Three commissioners were appointed, himself, his younger brother, and
his father-in-law, Appius Claudius, to carry it into effect; but the
very names showed that he had alienated his few supporters in the higher
circles, and that a single family was now contending against the united
wealth and distinction of Rome. The issue was only too certain. Popular
enthusiasm is but a fire of straw. In a year Tiberius Gracchus would be
out of office. Other tribunes would be chosen more amenable to
influence, and his work could then be undone. He evidently knew that
those who would succeed him could not be relied on to carry on his
policy. He had taken one revolutionary step already; he was driven on to
another, and he offered himself illegally to the Comitia for
re-election. It was to invite them to abolish the constitution, and to
make him virtual sovereign; and that a young man of thirty should have
contemplated such a position for himself as possible, is of itself a
proof of his unfitness for it. The election day came. The noble lords
and gentlemen appeared in the Campus Martius with their retinues of
armed servants and clients; hot-blooded aristocrats, full of disdain for
demagogues, and meaning to read a lesson to sedition which it would not
easily forget. Votes were given for Gracchus. Had the hustings been left
to decide the matter, he would have been chosen; but as it began to
appear how the polling would go, sticks were used and swords; a riot
rose, the unarmed citizens were driven off, Tiberius Gracchus himself
and three hundred of his friends were killed, and their bodies were
flung into the Tiber.

Thus the first sparks of the coming revolution were trampled out. But
though quenched and to be again quenched with fiercer struggles, it was
to smoulder and smoke and burst out time after time, till its work was
done. Revolution could not restore the ancient character of the Roman
nation, but it could check the progress of decay by burning away the
more corrupted parts of it. It could destroy the aristocracy and the
constitution which they had depraved, and under other forms preserve for
a few more centuries the Roman dominion. Scipio Africanus, when he heard
in Spain of the end of his bro