ty.
They had also observed that the most gifted, most energetic, and most
celebrated statesmen of Rome had found themselves, at the very moment
when they came forward as advocates of the Italians, deserted by their
own adherents and had been accordingly overthrown. In all the
vicissitudes of the thirty years of revolution and restoration
governments enough had been installed and deposed, but, however
the programme might vary, a short-sighted and narrow-minded spirit
sat always at the helm.

The Italians and the Oligarchy
The Licinio-Mucian Law

Above all, the recent occurrences had clearly shown how vain was the
expectation of the Italians that their claims would be attended to
by Rome. So long as the demands of the Italians were mixed up with
those of the revolutionary party and had in the hands of the latter
been thwarted by the folly of the masses, they might still resign
themselves to the belief that the oligarchy had been hostile merely
to the proposers, not to the proposal itself, and that there was still
a possibility that the mere intelligent senate would accept a measure
which was compatible with the nature of the oligarchy and salutary
for the state. But the recent years, in which the senate once more
ruled almost absolutely, had shed only too disagreeable a light on
the designs of the Roman oligarchy also. Instead of the expected
modifications, there was issued in 659 a consular law which most
strictly prohibited the non-burgesses from laying claim to the
franchise and threatened transgressors with trial and punishment--a
law which threw back a large number of most respectable persons who
were deeply interested in the question of equalization from the ranks
of Romans into those of Italians, and which in point of indisputable
legality and of political folly stands completely on a parallel with
that famous act which laid the foundation for the separation of North
America from the mother-country; in fact it became, just like that
act, the proximate cause of the civil war. It was only so much
the worse, that the authors of this law by no means belonged to
the obstinate and incorrigible Optimates; they were no other than
the sagacious and universally honoured Quintus Scaevola, destined,
like George Grenville, by nature to be a jurist and by fate to be
a statesman--who by his equally honourable and pernicious rectitude
inflamed more than any one else first the war between senate and
equites, and then that