Shortly afterwards the tribune Spurius Thorius[775] carried a law which again abolished the _vectigal_ on the allotments. If we regard this measure as an independent effort on the part of the tribune, it may have been an answer to the protests of the smaller agriculturists still struggling for existence; if it was dictated by the senate, it may have been due to the absorption of the allotments by the larger proprietors and their unwillingness to pay dues for land which they had added to their private property. But, to whatever party we may assign it, we may see in it also the desire to reach a final settlement of the agrarian question by abolishing all the invidious distinctions between the different tenures of land which had once formed part of the public domain. It removed the injustice of burdening the small holding with a rent which was not exacted from estates that had been partly formed by accretions of such allotments; and by the abolition of all dues[776] it tended to remove all land which had been assigned, from the doubtful category to which it had hitherto belonged of possessions which, though in a sense private, still recognised the overlordship of the State, and to revive in all its old sharpness the simple distinction between public and private land. This tendency makes it probable that the law of Thorius is identical with one of which we possess considerable fragments; for this partially preserved enactment is certainly as sweeping a measure as could have been devised by any one eager to see the agrarian question, so far as it affected Italian soil, finally removed from the region of political strife.