in the eyes of the law; it could neither vote nor decree. But it
practically ruled the street, and already the opinion of the street
was a power in Rome, so that it was of some importance whether this
confused mass received the communications made to it with silence or
shouts, whether it applauded and rejoiced or hissed and howled at
the orator. Not many had the courage to lord it over the populace
as Scipio Aemilianus did, when they hissed him on account of his
expression as to the death of his brother-in-law. "Ye," he said,
"to whom Italy is not mother but step-mother, ought to keep silence!"
and when their fury grew still louder, "Surely you do not think
that I will fear those let loose, whom I have sent in chains
to the slave-market?"

That the rusty machinery of the comitia should be made use of for the
elections and for legislation, was already bad enough. But when those
masses--the -comitia- primarily, and practically also the -contiones---
were permitted to interfere in the administration, and the instrument
which the senate employed to prevent such interferences was wrested out
of its hands; when this so-called burgess-body was allowed to decree
to itself lands along with all their appurtenances out of the public
purse; when any one, whom circumstances and his influence with the
proletariate enabled to command the streets for a few hours, found it
possible to impress on his projects the legal stamp of the sovereign
people's will, Rome had reached not the beginning, but the end of
popular freedom--had arrived not at democracy, but at monarchy.
For that reason in the previous period Cato and those who shared
his views never brought such questions before the burgesses,
but discussed them solely in the senate.(37) For that reason
contemporaries of Gracchus, the men of the Scipionic circle,
described the Flaminian agrarian law of 522--the first step in
that fatal career--as the beginning of the decline of Roman greatness.
For that reason they allowed the author of the domain-distribution
to fall, and saw in his dreadful end, as it were, a rampart against
similar attempts in future, while yet they maintained and turned
to account with all their energy the domain-distribution itself
which he had carried through--so sad was the state of things in
Rome that honest patriots were forced into the horrible hypocrisy
of abandoning the evil-doer and yet appropriating the fruit of
the evil deed. For that reason too the