uence of a whim of the wife and daughter through whom they were
connected. Some revolutions, it is true, are the effect of an instant's
passion or an hour's weakness. Nor can they then make use of subsequent
achievements to conceal the caprices or the excitements in which they
originated. But a change, attempted by Licinius with the help of his
father-in-law, his colleague, and a few friends reached back one hundred
years and more (B.C. 486) to the law of the martyred Cassius, and forward
to the end of the Commonwealth. It opened new honors as well as fresh
resources to the plebeians.

Probably the tribune was raised to his office because he had shown the
determination to use its powers for the good of his order and of his
country. Licinius and Sextius together brought forward the three bills
bearing the name of Licinius as their author. One, says the historian, ran
concerning debts. It provided that, the interest already[2] paid being
deducted from the principal, the remainder should be discharged in equal
installments within three years. The statutes against excessive rates of
interest, as well as those against arbitrary measures of exacting the
principal of a debt, had utterly failed. It was plain, therefore, to any
one who thought upon the matter,--in which effort of thought the power of
all reformers begins,--that the step to prevent the sacrifice of the debtor
to the creditor was still to be taken. Many of the creditors themselves
would have acknowledged that this was desirable. The next bill of the three
related to the public lands. It prohibited any one from occupying more than
five hundred jugera, about 300 acres; at the same time it reclaimed all
above that limit from the present occupiers, with the object of making
suitable apportionments among the people[3] at large. Two further clauses
followed, one ordering that a certain number of freemen should be employed
on every estate; another forbidding any single citizen[4] to send out more
than a hundred of the larger, or five hundred of the smaller cattle to
graze upon the public pastures. These latter details are important, not
so much in relation to the bill itself as to the simultaneous increase of
wealth and slavery which they plainly signify. As the first bill undertook
to prohibit the bondage springing from too much poverty, so the second
aimed at preventing the oppression springing from too great opulence. A
third bill declared the office of military tribune