em--which every
well-ordered state will endeavour as far as possible to place, if not
above political parties, at any rate aloof from them--into the midst
of the whirlpool of revolution. Certainly the blame of these
conflicting tendencies in Gaius Gracchus is chargeable to a very great
extent on his position rather than on himself personally. On the
very threshold of the -tyrannis- he was confronted by the fatal
dilemma, moral and political, that the same man had at one and the
same time to maintain his ground, we may say, as a robber-chieftain
and to lead the state as its first citizen--a dilemma to which
Pericles, Caesar, and Napoleon had also to make dangerous sacrifices.
But the conduct of Gaius Gracchus cannot be wholly explained from
this necessity; along with it there worked in him the consuming
passion, the glowing revenge, which foreseeing its own destruction
hurls the firebrand into the house of the foe. He has himself
expressed what he thought of his ordinance as to the jurymen and similar
measures intended to divide the aristocracy; he called them daggers
which he had thrown into the Forum that the burgesses--the men of
rank, obviously--might lacerate each other with them. He was a
political incendiary. Not only was the hundred years' revolution which
dates from him, so far as it was one man's work, the work of Gaius
Gracchus, but he was above all the true founder of that terrible
urban proletariate flattered and paid by the classes above it, which
through its aggregation in the capital--the natural consequence of
the largesses of corn--became at once utterly demoralized and aware
of its power, and which--with its demands, sometimes stupid, sometimes
knavish, and its talk of the sovereignty of the people--lay like
an incubus for five hundred years upon the Roman commonwealth and
only perished along with it And yet--this greatest of political
transgressors was in turn the regenerator of his country. There is
scarce a structural idea in Roman monarchy, which is not traceable
to Gaius Gracchus. From him proceeded the maxim--founded doubtless
in a certain sense in the nature of the old traditional laws of war,
but yet, in the extension and practical application now given to it,
foreign to the older state-law--that all the land of the subject
communities was to be regarded as the private property of the state;
a maxim, which was primarily employed to vindicate the right of the
state to tax that land at ple