impossible to say with precision which those acres were. The present condition of the land was no index; for some of the possessors had raised their portion of the public domain to as high a pitch of cultivation as their original patrimonies: and, as the commissioners were naturally anxious to secure arable land in good condition for the new settlers, the original occupiers sometimes found themselves in the enjoyment of marsh or swamp or barren soil,[444] which remained the sole relics of their splendid possessions. The judgments of the court were dissolving ancestral ties, destroying homesteads, and causing the transference of household gods to distant dwellings. Such are the inevitable results of an attempt to pry into ancient titles, and to investigate claims the basis of which lies even a few decades from the period of the inquisition. But, while these consequences were unfortunate, they were not likely to produce political complications so long as the grievances were confined to members of the citizen body. The vested interests which had been ignored in the passing of the measure might be brushed aside in its execution. Had the territory of Italy belonged to Rome, there would have been much grumbling but no resistance; for effective resistance required a shadow of legal right. But beyond the citizen body lay groups of states which were interested in varying degrees in the execution of the agrarian measure: and their grievances, whether legitimate or not, raised embarrassing questions of public law. The municipalities composed of Roman citizens or of half-burgesses had, as we saw, been alarmed at the introduction of the measure, perhaps through a misunderstanding of its import and from a suspicion that the land which had been given them in usufruct was to be resumed. Possibly the proceedings of the commission may have done something to justify this fear, for the limits of this land possessed by corporate bodies had probably become very ill-defined in the course of years. But, although a corporate was stronger than an individual interest and rested on some public guarantee, the complaints of these townships, composed as they were of burgesses, were merely part of the civic question, and must have been negligible in comparison with the protests of the federate cities of Italy and the Latins. We cannot determine what grounds the Italian Socii had either for fear or protest. It is not certain that land had been assigned to them in usufruct,[445] and such portions of their conquered territories as had been restored to them by the Roman State were their own property. But, whether the territories which they conceived to be threatened were owned or possessed by these communities, such ownership or possession was guaranteed to them by a sworn treaty, and it is inconceivable that the Gracchan legislation, the strongest and the weakest point of which was its strict legality, should have openly violated federative rights.