conflict, wherein neither side had any military reserve, acted as
it were the part of an army. It was clear that the senate was not
powerful enough to wrest either from the merchants or from the
proletariate their new privileges; any attempt to assail the corn-
laws or the new jury-arrangement would have led, under a somewhat
grosser or somewhat more civilized form, to a street-riot in presence
of which the senate was utterly defenceless. But it was no less
clear, that Gracchus himself and these merchants and proletarians were
only kept together by mutual advantage, and that the men of material
interests were ready to accept their posts, and the populace strictly so
called its bread, quite as well from any other as from Gaius Gracchus.
The institutions of Gracchus stood, for the moment at least,
immoveably firm with the exception of a single one--his own supremacy.
The weakness of the latter lay in the fact, that in the constitution of
Gracchus there was no relation of allegiance subsisting at all between
the chief and the army; and, while the new constitution possessed all
other elements of vitality, it lacked one--the moral tie between ruler
and ruled, without which every state rests on a pedestal of clay.
In the rejection of the proposal to admit the Latins to the franchise
it had been demonstrated with decisive clearness that the multitude
in fact never voted for Gracchus, but always simply for itself.
The aristocracy conceived the plan of offering battle to the author
of the corn-largesses and land-assignations on his own ground.

Rival Demagogism of the Senate
The Livian Laws

As a matter of course, the senate offered to the proletariate not merely
the same advantages as Gracchus had already assured to it in corn and
otherwise, but advantages still greater. Commissioned by the senate,
the tribune of the people Marcus Livius Drusus proposed to relieve
those who received land under the laws of Gracchus from the rent
imposed on them,(27) and to declare their allotments to be free and
alienable property; and, further, to provide for the proletariate
not in transmarine, but in twelve Italian, colonies, each of 3000
colonists, for the planting of which the people might nominate
suitable men; only, Drusus himself declined--in contrast with the
family-complexion of the Gracchan commission--to take part in this
honourable duty. Presumably the Latins were named as those who would
have to bear the costs of the plan,