Shortly after the death of Caius Gracchus--perhaps in the very year of his fall--a law was passed permitting the alienation of the allotments.[769] This measure must have been as welcome to the lately established possessors as it was to the large proprietors; it removed from the former a galling restraint which, like all such legal prohibitions, formed a sentimental rather than an actual grievance, but one that was none the less keenly felt on that account; while to the latter it offered the opportunity of satisfying those expectations, which the initial struggles of the newly created farmers must in many cases have aroused. The natural consequence of the enactment was that the spurious element amongst the peasant-holders, represented by those whose tastes and capacities utterly unfitted them for agriculture, parted with their allotments, which went once more to swell the large domains of their wealthier neighbours.[770] We do not know the extent or rapidity of this change, or the stage which it had reached when the government thought fit to introduce a new agrarian law, which may have been two or three years later than the enactment which permitted alienation.[771] The new measure contained three important provisions.[772] Firstly, it forbade the further distribution of public land, and thus put an end to the agrarian commission which had never ceased to exist, and had continued to enjoy, if not to exercise, its full powers since the restoration of its judicial functions by Caius Gracchus. We cannot say to what extent the commission was still Encountering claims on its jurisdiction and powers of distribution at the time of its disappearance; but fourteen years is a long term of power for such an extraordinary office, whose work was necessarily one of perpetual unsettlement; and the disappearance of the triumvirs must have been welcome, not only to the existing Roman occupants of land which still remained public, but to those of the Italians to whom the commission had ever been a source of apprehension. The extinction of the office must have been regarded with indifference by those for whom the commission had already provided, and by the large mass of the urban proletariate which did not desire this type of provision. The residuum of citizens which still craved land may be conceived to have been small, for eagerness to become an agriculturist would have suggested an earlier claim; and the passing of the commission was probably viewed with no regret by any large section of the community. The law then proceeded to establish the rights of all the occupants of land in Italy that had once been public and had been dealt with by the commission. To all existing occupants of the land which had been assigned, perfect security of tenure was given, and this security may have been extended now, as it certainly was later, to many of the occupants who still remained on public land which had not been subjected to distribution. So far as the