By the Licinian law it was enacted, that on every five hundred _jugera_, a certain number of free labourers (_cottagers_)[70] should be employed, that slaves might not work on them. But the rule had not been kept: thousands of slaves came in, as was also the case in Portugal from the sixteenth century to Pombal’s days, when negro slaves were so very cheap within the kingdom, owing to which indeed so many mulattoes are found there. The condition of Italy was now this: on the one hand, the number of Roman citizens had increased, partly--which was desirable--from the allies, but chiefly in a worse way from the freedmen, the common run of whom bore the brand of slavery; and on the other hand, the numbers of the hereditary land-holders and land-owners were dwindling fast. It is very likely that the first thought of amending this state of things, came into the mind of Tib. Gracchus on his return from Spain through Etruria, where he saw large tracts of country with nothing but slaves, who worked at the ground in chains, while the free-born men were begging and starving. The population of Rome had become more and more a true rabble, and in the country the poor increased at a fearful rate, an evil which alas! is now a growing one in Europe. The Romans did not blind themselves to the condition in which they were; they mourned over it, and acknowledged that, if the Licinian law had been observed and the poor had been allowed to occupy the land, there never would have been that wretchedness. Every body wished, like the king[71] in Goethe’s play, that “all were otherwise;” but no one had the courage to do anything. There is no doubt that just after the war with Hannibal, it would not have been hard to stop the mischief, and that was one of those momentous periods which sometimes follow after great convulsions, and must be taken advantage of, or else they are irrecoverably lost: one ought then to have created a magistracy to watch over the way in which the Licinian law was kept, and to distribute part of the conquered _ager publicus_, and to see that the occupation was fairly managed. Since that time, seventy years had passed, and every one must have looked blank at the very mention of a reform. C. Lælius is said to have thought of it, but to have given up the plan as impracticable; so that he got the surname of _Sapiens_. This was either a nickname, or else _sapiens_ here means prudent; for prudent it is not to stir up a wasp’s nest. There were now but few great families indeed which did not possess far more than the lawful quantity, and which did not keep more than a hundred head of cattle, and five hundred sheep and goats, upon their estates: all these were sure to be offended, if the Licinian law were carried out in all its rigour. As our governments have now the right, when a lease is out, of warning off a tenant on the crown-land, although his forefathers held it perhaps for many years before him; thus also the Roman government