oked him. With equal fearlessness he reproved and
publicly scolded the burgesses for every new injustice and every fresh
disorder. His vehement attacks provoked numerous enemies, and he
lived in declared and irreconcilable hostility with the most powerful
aristocratic coteries of the time, particularly the Scipios and
Flaminini; he was publicly accused forty-four times. But the farmers
--and it is a significant indication how powerful still in the Roman
middle class was the spirit which had enabled them to survive the day
of Cannae--never allowed the unsparing champion of reform to lack the
support of their votes. Indeed when in 570 Cato and his like-minded
patrician colleague, Lucius Flaccus, solicited the censorship, and
announced beforehand that it was their intention when in that office
to undertake a vigorous purification of the burgess-body through all
its ranks, the two men so greatly dreaded were elected by the
burgesses notwithstanding all the exertions of the nobility; and the
latter were obliged to submit, while the great purgation actually took
place and erased among others the brother of Africanus from the roll
of the equites, and the brother of the deliverer of the Greeks from
the roll of the senate.

Police Reform

This warfare directed against individuals, and the various attempts to
repress the spirit of the age by means of justice and of police,
however deserving of respect might be the sentiments in which they
originated, could only at most stem the current of corruption for a
short time; and, while it is remarkable that Cato was enabled in spite
of that current, or rather by means of it, to play his political part,
it is equally significant that he was as little successful in getting
rid of the leaders of the opposite party as they were in getting rid
of him. The processes of count and reckoning instituted by him and by
those who shared his views before the burgesses uniformly remained,
at least in the cases that were of political importance, quite as
ineffectual as the counter-accusations directed against him. Nor was
much more effect produced by the police-laws, which were issued at
this period in unusual numbers, especially for the restriction of
luxury and for the introduction of a frugal and orderly housekeeping,
and some of which have still to be touched on in our view of the
national economics.

Assignations of Land

Far more practical and more useful were the attempts made to
coun