by the insurrection, they
had at most renewed them as a matter of favour and subject to revocation
at pleasure.(20) The disability as regarded the right of voting
gave the deeper offence, that it was--as the comitia were then
constituted--politically absurd, and the hypocritical care of the
government for the unstained purity of the electors appeared to every
unprejudiced person ridiculous; but all these restrictions were
dangerous, inasmuch as they invited every demagogue to carry his
ulterior objects by taking up the more or less just demands of the
new burgesses and of the Italians excluded from the franchise. While
accordingly the more clear-seeing of the aristocracy could not but find
these partial and grudging concessions as inadequate as did the new
burgesses and the excluded themselves, they further painfully felt
the absence from their ranks of the numerous and excellent men whom
the Varian commission of high treason had exiled, and whom it was the
more difficult to recall because they had been condemned by the verdict
not of the people but of the jury-courts; for, while there was little
hesitation as to cancelling a decree of the people even of a judicial
character by means of a second, the cancelling of a verdict of
jurymen bythe people appeared to the betterportion of the aristocracy
as a very dangerous precedent. Thus neither the ultras nor the
moderates were content with the issue of the Italian crisis. But still
deeper indignation swelled the heart of the old man, who had gone
forth to the Italian war with freshened hopes and had come back from
it reluctantly, with the consciousness of having rendered new services
and of having received in return new and most severe mortifications,
with the bitter feeling of being no longer dreaded but despised by
his enemies, with that gnawing spirit of vengeance in his heart,
which feeds on its own poison. It was true of him also, as of the
new burgesses and the excluded; incapable and awkward as he had shown
himself to be, his popular name was still a formidable weapon in
the hand of a demagogue.

Decay of Military Discipline

With these elements of political convulsion was combined the rapidly
spreading decay of decorous soldierly habits and of military
discipline. The seeds, which were sown by the enrolment of the
proletariate in the army, developed themselves with alarming rapidity
during the demoralizing insurrectionary war, which compelled Rome
to admit t