are seemingly the greatest contradictions in it; but they vanish when we look at them from the right point of view: for we thus see that he did not wish to lend himself to any party. Far from it, he made use of the factions to carry out wholesome reforms, holding out to one side such and such advantage, and to the other something else, while he himself stood quite apart. His first step, as tribune of the people, was, of course, to avenge the death of his brother and his friends. Nasica had gone off with a commission to Asia, and did not return. His first law was that no one who had been deprived of his office by the people, should be invested with any other: this bill, which was evidently aimed against Octavius, he withdrew at the intercession of his mother. The second enacted that those men should be punished with death, who, without any previous trial, had laid hands upon Roman citizens, and slain them. This was chiefly directed against Lænas, who, when it passed, went into voluntary exile. Of the speech, in which Gracchus made these motions, we have a fine fragment still left, which Gellius pedantically criticises. These were the offerings with which he made atonement to the dead. The carrying out of the agrarian law had been decreed, and it went on, though rather sluggishly. The measure which has been most found fault with, is his having first brought in the practice of distributing corn to the common people living at Rome: in the way in which he did it, the _modius_ of corn was to be given out at three-quarters of an _as_, one-fourth of what it would cost elsewhere. This surely was not by any means a bribe, but a charity to the poor who wanted it. Rome had those great revenues which were paid in grain, and the treasury was so rich that it was not necessary to convert the corn into money. At the time of the Social war, there were about seventy-four millions sterling in the treasury, and these certainly could not be better bestowed than for the good of the poor: besides which, even from of old, corn had been distributed in the temple of Ceres; so that this was not even an innovation. The idea of a certain dignity being inherent in every one who belongs to a free people, lies at the bottom of everything that is done in a republic. A commonwealth has the duty of providing for its members, even for the most humble: this is a principle which England in some measure follows in her poor’s rates, whereas there is nothing of the kind in a despotic country, to belong to which gives no privilege. Now it so happened that part of the true Roman citizens, who also had their share with the rest in the sovereignty, were as poor as those paupers among us, who are maintained by the alms of the public: their numbers must have been immense; some of them were not in the tribes at all; others, as, for instance, the descendants of freedmen, were in the _tribus urbanæ_. The Gracchi wished to make peasants of as many of