A tax on servile labour employed on land, or the moderate regulation which Caesar subsequently enforced that a certain proportion of the herdsmen employed on the pasture lands should be of free birth,[751] would have been more practicable measures, and perhaps, if presented as an alternative to confiscation, might not have encountered an unconquerable resistance from the capitalists, although their very moderation might have won them but a lukewarm support from the people, and ensured the failure that attends on half-measures which do not carry their meaning on their face and lack the boldness which excites enthusiasm. But the real objection which the Gracchi and their circle would have had to legislation of this type, whether it had been suggested to them in its extreme shape or in some modified form, would have been that it could not have secured the object at which they aimed. Such measures would merely have revived the free labourer, while their dream was to re-establish the peasant proprietor, or at least the occupant who held his land on a perfectly secure tenure from the State. And even the revival of the free labourer would only have been exhibited on the most modest scale; for such legislation would have done nothing to reclaim arable land which had degenerated into pasturage, and to reawaken life in the great deserted tracts, whose solitude was only broken by the rare presence of the herdsman's cabin. To raise a cry for the restoration of free labour on this exiguous scale might have exposed a legislator to the disappointment, if not derision, of his friends and invited the criticism, effective because popular, of all his secret foes. The masters of the world were not likely to give enthusiastic support to a leader who exhibited as their goal the lonely, barren and often dangerous life of sheep-driver to some greedy capitalist, and who offered them the companionship, and not the service, of the slaves that their victorious arms had won.