Gracchus as a radical reactionary who was the first to drag a prisoned and incapable sovereign into the light of day. Had he done this, he would have been the author of a revolution and the creator of a new constitution. But this he never attempted to be, and such a view of his work rests on the mistaken impression that, at the time of his reforms, the senate was recognised as the true government of Rome. Such a pretension had never been published nor accepted. We are not concerned with its reality as a fact; but no sound analysis, whether undertaken by lawyer or historian, would have admitted its theoretical truth. The literary atmosphere teemed with theories of popular sovereignty of a limited kind, and Gracchus, while recognising this sovereignty, did little to remove its limitations. It is true that, like his brother, he legislated without seeking the customary sanction of the senate; but initial reforms could never have been carried through, had the legislator waited for this sanction; and the future freedom of the Comitia from senatorial control was at best guaranteed by the force of the example of the Gracchi, not by any new legal ordinances which they ordained. Earlier precedents of the same type had not been lacking, and it was only the comprehensiveness of the Gracchan legislation which seemed to give a new impetus to the view that in all fundamental matters, which called for regulation by Act of Parliament, the people was the single and uncontrolled sovereign. Thus was developed the idea of the possibility of a new period of growth, which should refashion the details of the structure of the State into greater correspondence with the changed conditions of the times. As the earlier process of change had raised the senate to power, the latter might be interpreted as containing a promise that a new master was to be given to the Roman world. But it is highly improbable that to Gracchus or to any of his contemporaries was the true nature of the prophecy revealed. For the moment a balance of power was established, and the moneyed class stood midway between the opposing factions of senate and people. Its new powers were intended to constrain the senate into efficiency rather than to reduce it to impotence, and to create these powers Gracchus had endowed the equestrian order with that right of audit which, in the earlier theory of the constitution, had been held to be one of the securest guarantees of the power of the people. Gracchus predicted the strife that was likely to follow this friction between the government and the courts; but this prediction, while it perhaps reveals the hope that in the issues of the future the mercantile class would generally be found on the side of the people, betrays still more clearly the belief that the people, and their patron of the moment, were utterly incapable of standing alone, and that no true democratic government was possible for Rome. In spite of his Hellenism Gracchus betrayed two