The alternative of protective legislation for the defence of Italian grain may be even more summarily dismissed. It was, in the first place, impossible from the point of view of political expediency. The Gracchi, or any other reforming legislators, had to depend for their main support on the voting population of the city of Rome: and such a constituency would never have dreamed for a moment of sanctioning a measure which would have made the price of corn dearer in the Roman market, even if the objections of the capitalists who placed the foreign grain on that market could have been successfully overcome. So far from dreaming of the practicability of such a scheme, Caius Gracchus had been forced to allow the sale of corn at Rome at a cost below the current market-price. But, even had protection been possible, it must have come as the last, not as the first, of the constructive measures necessary for the settlement of the agrarian question. It might have done something to keep the small farms standing, but these farms had to be created before their maintenance was secured; and if adopted, apart from some scheme aiming at a redivision of the land, such a protective measure would merely have benefited such existing owners of the large estates as still continued to devote a portion of their domains to agriculture. The fact, however, which may be regarded as certain, that foreign corn could undersell that of Italy in the Roman market, and probably in that of all the great towns within easy access of the sea, may seem a fatal flaw in the agrarian projects of the Gracchi. What reason was there for supposing that the tendencies which in the past had favoured the growth of large holdings and replaced agriculture by pasturage, should remain inoperative in the future? Tiberius Gracchus's own regulation about the inalienability of the lands which he assigned, seemed to reveal the suspicion that the tendencies towards accumulation had not yet been exhausted, and that the occupants of the newly created farms might not find the pursuit of agriculture so profitable as to cling to them in scorn of the enticements of the encroaching capitalist. Doubtless the prohibition to sell revealed a weakness in the agricultural system of the times; but the regulation was probably framed, not in despair of the small holder securing a maintenance, but as a protection against the money-lender, that curse of the peasant-proprietor, who might now be less willing to approach the peasant, when the security which he obtained could under no circumstances lead to his acquiring eventual ownership. With respect to the future, there was reasonable hope that the farmer, if kept in tolerable security from the strategic advances of his wealthier neighbours, would be able to hold his own. In a modern state, possessing a teeming population and a complex industrial organisation, where the profits of a widely spread commercial life have