aristocratic culture, gifted with all the authority which great wealth and a command of dignified oratory can give,[683] approaching them with bounties greater in appearance than those which Gracchus had recently been willing to impart, attaching no conditions to the gift and, though speaking in the name of the senate, conveying no hint of the deprivation of any of the privileges that had so recently been won. And the new largess was for the Roman people alone; it was not depreciated by the knowledge that the blessings, which it conferred or to which it was added, would be shared by rivals from every part of Italy. An aspirant for favour, who wished to enter on a race with the recent type of popular leader, must inevitably think of provision for the poor; but a mere copy or extension of the Gracchan proposals was impossible. No measure that had been fiercely opposed by the senate could be defended with decency by the representative, and, as Drusus came in after time to be styled, the "advocate" of that body.[684] Such a scheme as an extension of the system of corn distribution would besides have shocked the political sense both of the patron and his clients, and would not have served the political purposes of the latter, since such a concession could not easily have been rescinded. The system of agrarian assignation, in the form in which it had been carried through by the hands of the Gracchi, had at the moment a complete machinery for its execution, and there was no plausible ground for extending this measure of benevolence. The older system of colonisation was the device which naturally occurred to Drusus and his advisers, and the choice was the more attractive in that it might be employed in a manner which would accentuate certain elements in the Gracchan scheme of settlement that had not commended themselves to public favour. The masses of Rome desired the monopoly of every prize which the favourite of the moment had to bestow; but Gracchus's colonies were meant for the middle class, not for the very poor, and the preliminary to membership of the settlements was an uncomfortable scrutiny into means, habits and character.[685] The masses desired comfort. Capua may have pleased them, but they had little liking for a journey across the sea to the site of desolated Carthage. The very modesty of Gracchus's scheme, as shown in the number of the settlements projected and of the colonists who were to find a home in each, proved that it was not intended as a benefit to the proletariate as a whole. Drusus came forward with a proposal for twelve colonies, all of which were probably to be settled on Italian and Sicilian soil;[686] each of these foundations was to provide for three thousand settlers, and emigrants were not excluded on the ground of poverty. An oblique reflection on the disinterestedness of Gracchus's efforts was further given in the clause which created the commissioners