least of all in the case of a nature so vehemently
earnest and so far aloof from all that is vulgar as was that of Gaius
Gracchus. Nevertheless it may not conceal the fact that his whole
legislation was pervaded in a most pernicious way by conflicting
aims; for on the one hand it aimed at the public good, while on the
other hand it ministered to the personal objects and in fact the
personal vengeance of the ruler. Gracchus earnestly laboured to find
a remedy for social evils, and to check the spread of pauperism; yet
he at the same time intentionally reared up a street proletariate of
the worst kind in the capital by his distributions of corn, which were
designed to be, and became, a premium to all the lazy and hungry civic
rabble. Gracchus censured in the bitterest terms the venality of
the senate, and in particular laid bare with unsparing and just
severity the scandalous traffic which Manius Aquillius had driven with
the provinces of Asia Minor;(25) yet it was through the efforts of
the same man that the sovereign populace of the capital got itself
alimented, in return for its cares of government, by the body of its
subjects. Gracchus warmly disapproved the disgraceful spoliation of
the provinces, and not only instituted proceedings of wholesome
severity in particular cases, but also procured the abolition of the
thoroughly insufficient senatorial courts, before which even Scipio
Aemilianus had vainly staked his whole influence to bring the most
decided criminals to punishment. Yet he at the same time, by the
introduction of courts composed of merchants, surrendered the
provincials with their hands fettered to the party of material
interests, and thereby to a despotism still more unscrupulous than
that of the aristocracy had been; and he introduced into Asia a
taxation, compared with which even the form of taxation current after
the Carthaginian model in Sicily might be called mild and humane--
just because on the one hand he needed the party of moneyed men,
and on the other hand required new and comprehensive resources to
meet his distributions of grain and the other burdens newly imposed
on the finances. Gracchus beyond doubt desired a firm administration
and a well-regulated dispensing of justice, as numerous thoroughly
judicious ordinances testify; yet his new system of administration
rested on a continuous series of individual usurpations only formally
legalized, and he intentionally drew the judicial syst