with injudicious and
dishonest management of the war (545), which even compelled him to
come from the camp to the capital and there demonstrate his military
capacity before the public; the still more scandalous attempts to
refuse by decree of the burgesses to the victor of Pydna his
triumph;(66) the investiture--suggested, it is true, by the senate--of
a private man with extraordinary consular authority (544;(67)); the
dangerous threat of Scipio that, if the senate should refuse him the
chief command in Africa, he would seek the sanction of the burgesses
(549;(68)); the attempt of a man half crazy with ambition to extort
from the burgesses, against the will of the government, a declaration
of war in every respect unwarranted against the Rhodians (587;(69));
and the new constitutional axiom, that every state-treaty acquired
validity only through the ratification of the people.

Interference of the Community with the Finances

This joint action of the burgesses in governing and in commanding was
fraught in a high degree with peril. But still more dangerous was
their interference with the finances of the state; not only because
any attack on the oldest and most important right of the government
--the exclusive administration of the public property--struck at the
root of the power of the senate, but because the placing of the most
important business of this nature--the distribution of the public
domains--in the hands of the primary assemblies of the burgesses
necessarily dug the grave of the republic. To allow the primary
assembly to decree the transference of public property without limit
to its own pocket is not only wrong, but is the beginning of the end;
it demoralizes the best-disposed citizens, and gives to the proposer
a power incompatible with a free commonwealth. Salutary as was the
distribution of the public land, and doubly blameable as was the
senate accordingly for omitting to cut off this most dangerous of all
weapons of agitation by voluntarily distributing the occupied lands,
yet Gaius Flaminius, when he came to the burgesses in 522 with the
proposal to distribute the domains of Picenum, undoubtedly injured the
commonwealth more by the means than he benefited it by the end.
Spurius Cassius had doubtless two hundred and fifty years earlier
proposed the same thing;(70) but the two measures, closely as they
coincided in the letter, were yet wholly different, inasmuch as
Cassius submitted a matter affectin