land which had been assigned was concerned, this law could have made no specification as to the size of the allotments, for the law permitting alienation had made it practically private property and given its purchaser a perfectly secure title. Hence the accumulations which followed the permit to alienate were secured to their existing possessors, and a legal recognition was given to the formation of such large estates as had come into existence during the last three years. But the security of tenure was conditioned by the reimposition of the dues payable to the State, which had been abolished by Drusus. We are not informed whether these dues were to be henceforth paid only by those who had received allotments from the land commission, or by all in whose hands such allotments were at the moment to be found; perhaps the intention was to impose them on all lands that had been public before the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus; although many of the larger proprietors, who had recently added to their holdings, might have urged in their defence that they had acquired the land as private property and that it was burdened by no dues at the time of its acquisition. But, even if this burden fell mainly on the class of smaller possessors, it could scarcely be regarded as a grievance, for it had formed part of the Gracchan scheme, and there was no legitimate reason why the newly established class of cultivators should be placed in a better position than the older occupants of the public domain, who still paid dues both on arable land and for the privilege of pasturing their flocks. The temporary motive which had led to their abolition had now ceased to exist, for the agricultural colonies of Drusus, who had promised land free from all taxes, had not been established, and the chief, almost the sole, example of a recent assignment on such liberal principles was to be discovered in distant Africa. But, even if the cultivators grumbled, their complaints were not dangerous to the government. They would have found no echo at Rome, where the urban proletariate was content with the easier provision which had been made for its support; and the new revenues from the public land were made still more acceptable to the eyes of the masses by the provision contained in this agrarian law that they should be employed solely for the benefit of needier citizens. The precise nature of the promised employment is unhappily unknown, our authority merely informing us that "they were to be used for purposes of distribution". We cannot understand by these words free gifts either in money or corn; for such extreme measures never entered even into the social ideals of Caius Gracchus, and the senate to its credit never deigned to purchase popularity through the pauperising institutions by which the Caesars maintained the security of their rule in Rome. The words might imply an extension of the system of the sale of cheap corn,