In this way was the reaction of the aristocracy completed. It left nothing of the Sempronian law. Appian[31] has fully comprehended all this, and, in his enumeration of the three laws, connection between which he indicates, we see clearly the entire revolutionary system, conducted, we must admit, with a rare address and a perfidy which rendered the effect certain. The aristocracy did not rest. As soon as they had gained the people by their new bait of money and food, soothed them by their apparent generosity, and familiarized them with the idea that the _possessions_ of the nobles were not only legally acquired but inviolable, then they raised the mask, and by a bold step swept away the _vectigal_,[32] thus leaving their property free. The enactment of this law virtually closed the long struggle between patrician and plebeian over the public lands of Rome, and left them as full property in the hands of the rich nobility. The results could hardly have been otherwise. Sumptuary laws, false economic principles, had closed all channels[33] of trade and manufacture to the nobility, while conquest had filled their hands with gold and placed at their disposal vast numbers[34] of slaves. There was but one channel open for the investment of this gold,--the agrarian.[35] Farming and cattle-raising were the only occupations in which slaves could be used with advantage and so, as a natural result of Roman economics, the plebeian, with little or no money and subject to the military call, was compelled to enter into a one-sided contest with capital and slave labor. So long as these conditions existed so long would all the laws of the world fail to save him from abject poverty and its attendant evils. [Footnote 1: Rudorff, _Ackergesetz des Spurius Thorius_, Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft, Band X, s. 1-158. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, vol. V, pp. 75-86. Wordsworth, _Specimens and Fragments of Early Latin_, 440-459.] [Footnote 2: Appian, _Bell. Civ._, I, c. 27.] [Footnote 3: Ihne, _Roman History_, V, 9.] [Footnote 4: Momm., _Rom. Hist._, III, 165.] [Footnote 5: Long, _Decline of the Rom. Rep._, I, 352. See Lange, _Röm. Alter._, III, 48.] [Footnote 6: Long, _loc. cit._] [Footnote 7: Momm., III, 161; Ihne, V, 10.] [Footnote 8: Long, _loc. cit._] [Footnote 9: Lange, III, 48-49; Marquardt u. Momm., IV, 108.] [Footnote 10: Long, _loc. cit._ Momm., III, 167-168; Ihne, V, 8-10.] [Footnote 11: Appian, I, c. 27.] [Footnote 12: Long, I, 353.] [Footnote 13: Long, I, 354.] [Footnote 14: Ihne, V, 10-11.] [Footnote 15: Long, I, 353; Wordsworth, 440; Momm., III, 165, note; Ihne, V, 9; Lange, III, 48; Appian, I, c. 27.] [Footnote 16: Cicero, _Brut._, 36.] [Footnote 17: Cicero, _De Orat._, II, 70.] [Footnote 18: Marquardt u. Momm., _Röm. Alter._, IV, 108, n. 4; Wordsworth, 441.] [Footnote 19: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, vol. I, p. 74.] [Footnote 20: Appian, I, c. 27.] [Footnote 21: Long, I, 355; Wordsworth, 440.]