moulded and handed on the conception of Carbo's life, showed the usual incapacity of such writings to appreciate the possibility of that honest mental detachment from a suspected cause which often leads, through growing dissension with past colleagues and increasing co-operation with new, to a more violent advocacy of a new faith than is often shown by its habitual possessors. The records of the political contests which occupied the two years succeeding the downfall of Caius Gracchus, are sufficient to prove that political thought was not stifled, that practically any political views--saving perhaps such as expressed active sympathy with the final efforts of Caius Gracchus and his friends--might be pronounced, and that the nobility could only maintain its influence by bending its ear to the chatter of the streets and employing its best instruments to mould the opinion of the Forum by a judicious mixture of deference and exhortation. The senate knew itself to be as weak as ever in material resources; government could not be maintained for ever by a series of _coups d'etat_, and the only method of securing the interests of the rulers was to maintain the confidence of the majority and to presume occasionally on its apathy or blindness. This was the attitude adopted with reference to the proposals which had lately been before the people. Drusus's scheme of colonisation was not withdrawn, but its execution was indefinitely postponed,[766] and the same treatment was meted out to the similar proposals of Caius Gracchus. Two of his Italian colonies, Neptunia near Tarentum and Scylacium, seem actually to have survived; but this may have been due to the fact that the work of settlement had already commenced on these sites, and that the government did not venture to rescind any measure which had been already put into execution. It was indeed possible to stifle the settlement on the site of Carthage, for here the superstition of the people supported the objections of the senate, and the question of the abrogation of this colony had been raised to such magnitude by the circumstances of Gracchus's fall that to withdraw would have been a sign of weakness. But even this objectionable settlement in Africa gave proof of the scruples of the senate in dealing with an accomplished fact. When the Rubrian law was repealed, it was decided not to take from the _coloni_ the lands which had already been assigned; no religious pretext could be given for their disturbance, for the land of Carthage was not under the ban that doomed the city to desolation; and the colonists remained in possession of allotments, which were free from tribute, were held as private property, and furnished one of the earliest examples of a Roman tenure of land on provincial soil.[767] The assignment was by the nature of the case changed from that of the colonial to that of the purely agrarian type; the settlers were members of Rome alone and had no local