Gracchi Marius and Sulla | Page 4

of the political revolution. [Sidenote:
Parallel between Roman and English history.] Englishmen can
understand such an intermixture the more readily from the analogies,
more or less close, which their own history supplies. They have had a
monarchy. They have been ruled by an oligarchy, which has first
confronted and then coalesced with the moneyed class, and the united
orders have been forced to yield theoretical equality to almost the entire
nation, while still retaining real authority in their own hands. They have
seen a middle class coquetting with a lower class in order to force an
upper class to share with it its privileges, and an upper class resorting in
its turn to the same alliance; and they may have noted something more
than a superficial resemblance between the tactics of the patres and
nobiles of Rome and our own magnates of birth and commerce. Even
now they are witnessing the displacement of political by social
questions, and, it is to be hoped, the successful solution of problems
which in the earlier stages of society have defied the efforts of every
statesman. Yet they know that, underlying all the political struggles of
their history, questions connected with the rights and interests of rich
and poor, capitalist and toiler, land-owner and land-cultivator, have
always been silently and sometimes violently agitated. Political
emancipation has enabled social discontent to organize itself and find
permanent utterance, and we are to-day facing some of the demands to
satisfy which the Gracchi sacrificed their lives more than 2,000 years
ago. [Sidenote: The struggle between the orders chiefly agrarian.] With
us indeed the wages question is of more prominence than the land
question, because we are a manufacturing nation; but the principles at
stake are much the same. At Rome social agitation was generally
agrarian, and the first thing necessary towards understanding the
Gracchan revolution is to gain a clear conception of the history of the
public land.

[Sidenote: Origin of the Ager Publicus.] The ground round a town like
Rome was originally cultivated by the inhabitants, some of whom, as
more food and clothing were required, would settle on the soil. From
them the ranks of the army were recruited; and, thus doubly oppressed
by military service and by the land tax, which had to be paid in coin,
the small husbandman was forced to borrow from some richer man in
the town. Hence arose usury, and a class of debtors; and the sum of
debt must have been increased as well as the number of the debtors by
the very means adopted to relieve it. [Sidenote: Fourfold way of
dealing with conquered territory.] When Rome conquered a town she
confiscated a portion of its territory, and disposed of it in one of four
ways. [Sidenote: Colonies.] 1. After expelling the owners, she sent
some of her own citizens to settle upon it. They did not cease to be
Romans, and, being in historical times taken almost exclusively from
the plebs, must often have been but poorly furnished with the capital
necessary for cultivating the ground. [Sidenote: Sale.] 2. She sold it;
and, as with us, when a field is sold, a plan is made of its dimensions
and boundaries, so plans of the land thus sold were made on tablets of
bronze, and kept by the State. [Sidenote: Occupation.] 3. She allowed
private persons to 'occupy' it on payment of 'vectigal,' or a portion of
the produce; and, though not surrendering the title to the land,
permitted the possessors to use it as their private property for purchase,
sale, and succession. [Sidenote: Commons.] 4. A portion was kept as
common pasture land for those to whom the land had been given or
sold, or by whom it was occupied and those who used it paid 'scriptura,'
or a tax of so much per head on the beasts, for whose grazing they sent
in a return. This irregular system was fruitful in evil. It suited the patres
with whom it originated, for they were for a time the sole gainers by it.
Without money it must have been hopeless to occupy tracts distant
from Rome. The poor man who did so would either involve himself in
debt, or be at the mercy of his richer neighbours, whose flocks would
overrun his fields, or who might oust him altogether from them by
force, and even seize him himself and enroll him as a slave. The rich
man, on the other hand, could use such land for pasture, and leave the
care of his flocks and herds to clients and slaves. [Sidenote: This
irregular system the germ of latifundia.] So originated those 'latifundia,'
or large farms, which greatly contributed to the ruin of Rome and Italy.

The tilled land grew less and with it dwindled the free population and
the