The law then quits the public domains of Italy for those of Africa and Corinth, partly for the purpose of specifying with exactitude the rights of the various occupiers and tenants who were settled on the territories, but chiefly with the object of effecting the sale of some of the public domain in the province of Africa and the dependency of Achaea. This intention of alienation is perhaps the chief reason why the great varieties of tenure of the African soil are marshalled before us with such detail and precision; for it was necessary, in view of the contemplated sale, to re-assert the stability of rights that should be secure by their very nature or had been guaranteed by solemn compact. But the occasion of a comprehensive settlement of the agrarian question in Italy was no doubt gladly seized as affording the right opportunity for surveying, revising, and establishing the claims of those who were in enjoyment of what was, or had been, the provincial domain of Rome across the seas. The rights of Roman citizens and subjects are indifferently considered, and amongst the former those of the settlers who had journeyed to Africa in accordance with the promises of the Rubrian law are fully recognised. The degree of permanence accorded to the manifold kinds of tenure passed in review can not be determined from our text; but, even when all claims that deserved a permanent recognition had been subtracted, there still remained a residuum of land, leased at quinquennial intervals by the censors, which might be alienated without the infliction of injury on established rights. We do not know to what extent this sale, the mechanism for which was minutely provided for in the law, was carried in Africa; its application to the domain land of Corinth was either withdrawn or, if carried out, was but slight or temporary; for Corinthian land remained to be threatened by later agrarian legislation. It is not easy to suggest a motive for this sale; for it would seem a short-sighted policy to part, on an extensive scale and therefore presumably at a cheapened rate, with some of the most productive land in the world, such as was the African domain of the period, in order to recoup the treasury for the immediate pecuniary injury which it was suffering in the loss of the revenues from the public land of Italy. Perhaps the government had grown suspicious of the operations of the middle-men, and, since they had restricted their activity by limiting the amount of public land in Italy, deemed a similar policy advisable in relation to some of their foreign dependencies.