And it would be worth the while of any individual or party which ventured to frame a programme traversing the lines of political orthodoxy, to bid for the co-operation of this class. For recent history had shown that the thorough organisation of capital, encouraged by the State to rid itself of a tiresome burden in times of peace and to secure itself a support in times of need, might become, as it pleased, a bulwark or a menace to the government which had created it. The useful monster had begun to develop a self-consciousness of his own. He had his amiable, even his patriotic moments; but his activity might be accompanied by the grim demand for a price which his nominal master was not prepared to pay. The darkest and the brightest aspects of the commercial spirit had been in turn exhibited during the Second Punic War. On the one hand we find an organised band of publicans attempting to break up an assembly before which a fraudulent contractor and wrecker was to be tried;[142] on the other, we find them meeting the shock of Cannae with the offer of a large loan to the beggared treasury, lent without guarantee and on the bare word of a ruined government that it should be met when there was money to meet it.[143] Other companies came forward to put their hands to the public works, even the most necessary of which had been suspended by the misery of the war, and told the bankrupt State that they would ask for their payment when the struggle had completely closed.[144] A noble spectacle! and if the positions of employer and employed had been reversed only in such crises and in such a way, no harm could come of the memory either of the obligation or the service. But the strength shown by this beneficence sometimes exhibited itself in unpleasant forms and led to unpleasant consequences. The censorships of Cato and of Gracchus had been fierce struggles of conservative officialdom against the growing influence and (as these magistrates held) the swelling insolence of the public companies; and in both cases the associations had sought and found assistance, either from a sympathetic party within the senate, or from the people. Cato's regulations had been reversed and their vigorous author had been threatened with a tribunician prosecution before the Comitia;[145] while Gracchus and his colleague had actually been impeached before a popular court.[146] The reckless employment of servile labour by the companies that farmed the property of the State had already proved a danger to public security. The society which had purchased from the censors the right of gathering pitch from the Bruttian forest of Sila had filled the neighbourhood with bands of fierce and uncontrolled dependants, chiefly slaves, but partly men of free birth who may have been drawn from the desperate Bruttians whom Rome had driven from their homes. The consequences were deeds of violence and murder, which called for the intervention of the senate, and the consuls had been appointed as a