An agricultural revival was, therefore, possible; but its success demanded a spirit that would enter readily into the work, and submit without a murmur to the conditions of life which the stern task enjoined. It was here that the agrarian legislation of the Gracchi found its obstacle. So far as it did fail--so far, that is, as it was not sufficient to prevent the renewed accumulation of the people in the towns and the continued depopulation of the country districts--it failed because it offended against social ideals rather than against economic tendencies. Many of the settlers whom it planted on the allotments, must already have been demoralised by the feverish atmosphere of Rome; while others of a saner and more vigorous type may have soon looked back on the capital, not as the lounging-place of the idler, but as the exchange of the world, or have turned their thoughts to the provinces as the sphere where energy was best rewarded and capital gave its speediest returns. Of the other social measures of this period, colonisation, in so far as it had a purely agricultural object, is subject to the criteria that have been applied to the agrarian movements of the time; although it is possible that the formation of new or the remodelling of old political societies, which must have followed the scheme of Drusus, had this been ever realised, would have infused a more vigorous life in agricultural settlements of this type than was likely to be awakened in those which formed a mere outlying part of Rome or some existing municipality. We have seen how the colonial plan of Drusus differed in its intention from that of Caius Gracchus; but the latter statesman had, in the settlement which he projected at Junonia, planned a foundation which would proximately have lived on the wealth of its territory rather than on its trade, and must always have been, like Carthage of old, as much an agricultural as a commercial state. To an agrarian project such as this no economic objection could have been offered and, had the scheme of transmarine colonisation been fully carried out, the provinces themselves might have been made to benefit the farming class of Italy, whose economic foes they had become. The distance also of such settlements from Rome would have blunted the craving for the life of the capital, which beset the minds and paralysed the energies of the occupants of Italian land.