r 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,