on one another by necessity, they are urged by ambition,
which has such dominion in their hearts that it never leaves them to
whatsoever heights they climb. For nature has so ordered it that while
they desire everything, it is impossible for them to have everything,
and thus their desires being always in excess of their capacity to
gratify them, they remain constantly dissatisfied and discontented. And
hence the vicissitudes in human affairs. For some seeking to enlarge
their possessions, and some to keep what they have got, wars and
enmities ensue, from which result the ruin of one country and the growth
of another.

I am led to these reflections from observing that the commons of Rome
were not content to secure themselves against the nobles by the creation
of tribunes, a measure to which they were driven by necessity, but after
effecting this, forthwith entered upon an ambitious contest with the
nobles, seeking to share with them what all men most esteem, namely,
their honours and their wealth. Hence was bred that disorder from which
sprang the feuds relating to the Agrarian Laws, and which led in the end
to the downfall of the Roman republic. And although it should be the
object of every well-governed commonwealth to make the State rich and
keep individual citizens poor it must be allowed that in the matter of
this law the city of Rome was to blame; whether for having passed it at
first in such a shape as to require it to be continually recast; or
for having postponed it so long that its retrospective effect was the
occasion of tumult; or else, because, although rightly framed at first,
it had come in its operation to be perverted. But in whatever way it
happened, so it was, that this law was never spoken of in Rome without
the whole city being convulsed.

The law itself embraced two principal provisions. By one it was enacted
that no citizen should possess more than a fixed number of acres of
land; by the other that all lands taken from the enemy should be
distributed among the whole people. A twofold blow was thus aimed at the
nobles; since all who possessed more land than the law allowed, as most
of the nobles did, fell to be deprived of it; while by dividing the
lands of the enemy among the whole people, the road to wealth was
closed. These two grounds of offence being given to a powerful class,
to whom it appeared that by resisting the law they did a service to the
State, the whole city, as I have said, was th