Now the first thing to remark about the law is that it was by no means a demagogue’s sop tossed to the city mob which he was courting.  Gracchus saw slave labour ruining free labour, and the manhood and soil of Italy and the Roman army proportionately depreciated. [Sidenote:  Nothing demagogic about the proposal.] To fill the vacuum he proposed to distribute to the poor not only of Rome but of the Municipia, of the Roman colonies, and, it is to be presumed, of the Socii also, land taken from the rich members of those four component parts of the Roman State.  This consideration alone destroys at once the absurd imputation of his being actuated merely by demagogic motives; but in no history is it adequately enforced.  No demagogue at that epoch would have spread his nets so wide.  At the same time it gives the key to the subsequent manoeuvres by which his enemies strove to divide his partisans.  Broadly, then, we may say that Gracchus struck boldly at the very root of the decadence of the whole peninsula, and that if his remedy could not cure it nothing else could. [Sidenote:  The Socii—­land-owners.] How the Socii became possessors of the public land we do not know.  Probably they bought it from Cives Romani, its authorised occupiers, with the connivance of the State.  We now see from whom the land was to be taken, namely, the rich all over Italy, and to whom it was to be given, the poor all over Italy; and also the object with which it was to be given, namely, to re-create a peasantry and stop the increase of the slave-plague. [Sidenote:  Provision against evasions of the law.] In order to prevent the law becoming a dead letter like that of Licinius, owing to poor men selling their land as soon as they got it, he proposed that the new land-owners should not have the right to dispose of their land to others, and for this, though it would have been hard to carry out, we cannot see what other proviso could have been substituted.  Lastly, as death and other causes would constantly render changes in the holdings inevitable, he proposed that a permanent board should have the superintendence of them, and this too was a wise and necessary measure.

[Sidenote:  Provision for the administration of the law.] We can understand so much of the law of Gracchus, but it is hard thoroughly to understand more.  It has been urged as a difficulty not easily explained that few people, after retaining 500 jugera for themselves and 250 for each of their sons, would have had much left to surrender.  But this difficulty is imaginary rather than real; for Appian says that the public land was ‘the greater part’ of the land taken by Rome from conquered states, and the great families may have had vast tracts of it as pasture land. [Sidenote:  Things about the law hard to understand.] There are, however, other things which with our meagre knowledge of the law we cannot explain.  For instance, was a hard and fast line drawn at 500 jugera as compensation whether a man