neship of the people, in order now to carry the law
which he had formerly proposed without success--he made a proposal
to grant to the Latins the full franchise, and to the other Italian
allies the former rights of the Latins. But the proposal encountered
the united opposition of the senate and the mob of the capital.
The nature of this coalition and its mode of conflict are clearly and
distinctly seen from an accidentally preserved fragment of the speech
which the consul Gaius Fannius made to the burgesses in opposition to
the proposal. "Do you then think," said the Optimate, "that, if you
confer the franchise on the Latins, you will be able to find a place
in future--just as you are now standing there in front of me--in the
burgess-assembly, or at the games and popular amusements? Do you not
believe, on the contrary, that those people will occupy every spot?"
Among the burgesses of the fifth century, who on one day conferred
the franchise on all the Sabines, such an orator might perhaps have
been hissed; those of the seventh found his reasoning uncommonly clear
and the price of the assignation of the Latin domains, which was
offered to it by Gracchus, far too low. The very circumstance, that
the senate carried a permission to eject from the city all non-
burgesses before the day for the decisive vote, showed the fate in
store for the proposal. And when before the voting Livius Drusus,
a colleague of Gracchus, interposed his veto against the law, the
people received the veto in such a way that Gracchus could not
venture to proceed further or even to prepare for Drusus the fate
of Marcus Octavius.

Overthrow of Gracchus

It was, apparently, this success which emboldened the senate to
attempt the overthrow of the victorious demagogue. The weapons of
attack were substantially the same with which Gracchus himself had
formerly operated. The power of Gracchus rested on the mercantile
class and the proletariate; primarily on the latter, which in this
conflict, wherein neither side had any military reserve, acted as
it were the part of an army. It was clear that the senate was not
powerful enough to wrest either from the merchants or from the
proletariate their new privileges; any attempt to assail the corn-
laws or the new jury-arrangement would have led, under a somewhat
grosser or somewhat more civilized form, to a street-riot in presence
of which the senate was utterly defenceless. But it was no less
clear, that