, and installed farmers in their stead; and these farmers
became, as Gracchus intended, a strong reinforcement to the Roman
soldier-class, as well as a check to slave labour. What was done at
Rome was done also, it is said, throughout Italy, and if on the same
scale, it must have been a really enormous measure of relief to the
poor, and a vast stride towards a return to a healthier tenure of the
land. [Sidenote: Difficulties and hardships in enforcing it.] But it
is not hard to imagine what heart-burnings the commissioners must have
aroused. Some men were thrust out of tilled land on to waste land.
Some who thought that their property was private property found to
their cost that it was the State's. Some had encroached, and their
encroachments were now exposed. Some of the Socii had bought parcels
of the land, and found out now that they had no title. Lastly, some
land had been by special decrees assigned to individual states, and
the commissioners at length proceeded to stretch out their hands
towards it.

Historians, while recording such things, have failed to explain why
the chief opposition to the commissioners arose from the country which
had furnished the chief supporters of Tiberius, and what was the exact
attitude assumed by Scipio Aemilianus. It is lost sight of that as at
Rome there were two classes, so there were two classes in Italy. It
is absurd constantly to put prominently forward the sharp division of
interests in the capital, and then speak of the country classes as
if they were all one body, and their interests the same. [Sidenote:
Divisions in Italy similar to those in Rome.] The natural and
apparently the only way of explaining what at first sight seems the
inconsistency of the country class is to conclude, that the men who
supported Tiberius were the poor of the Italian towns and the small
farmers of the country, while the men who called on Scipio to save
them from the commissioners were the capitalists of the towns and the
richer farmers--some of them voters, some of them non-voters--with
their forces swollen, it may be, by not a few who, having clamoured
for more land, found now that the title to what they already had was
called in question. Though this cannot be stated as a certainty, it at
least accounts for what historians, after many pages on the subject,
have left absolutely unexplained, and it presents the conduct of
Scipio Aemilianus in quite a different light from the one in which it
has