Such was the measure that seemed to its proposer a reasonable and equitable means of remedying a grave injustice and restoring rather than giving rights to the poor. He might, if he would, have insisted on simple restitution. Had he pressed the letter of the law, not an atom of the public domain need have been left to its present occupiers. The possessor had no rights against the State; he held on sufferance, and technically he might be supposed to be always waiting for his summons to ejectment. To give such people something over and above the limit that the laws had so long prescribed, to give them further a security of tenure for the land retained which amounted almost to complete ownership--were not these unexpected concessions that should be received with gratitude? And even up to the eve of the polling the murmurs of the opposition were sometimes met by appeals to its nobler sentiments. The rich, said Gracchus, if they had the interests of Italy, its future hopes and its unborn generations at heart, should make this land a free gift to the State; they were vexing themselves about small issues and refusing to face the greater problems of the day.[349] But personal interests can never seem small, and the average man is more concerned with the present than with the future. The opposition was growing in volume day by day, and the murmurs were rising into shrieks. The class immediately threatened must have been numerically small; but they made up in combination and influence what they lacked in numbers. It was always easy to startle the solid commercial world of Rome by the cry of "confiscation". A movement in this direction might have no limits; the socialistic device of a "re-division of land," which had so often thrown the Greek commonwealths into a ferment, was being imported into Roman politics. All the forces of respectability should be allied against this sinister innovation. It is probable that many who propagated these views honestly believed that they exactly fitted the facts of the case. The possessors did indeed know that they were not owners. They were reminded of the fact whenever they purchased the right of occupation from a previous possessor, for such a title could not pass by mancipation; or whenever they sued for the recovery of an estate from which they had been ejected, for they could not make the plea before the praetor that the land was theirs "according to the right of the Quirites," but could rely only on the equitable assistance of the magistrate tendered through the use of the possessory interdicts; or, more frequently still, whenever they paid their dues to the Publicanus, that disinterested middle-man, who had no object in compromising with the possessors, and could seldom have allowed an acre of land to escape his watchful eye. But, in spite of these reminders, there was an impression that the tenure was perfectly secure, and that the State would never again re-assert its lordship in the extreme form of