senate to fix the boundaries of the land in question, and sell, or let it out in farms for the benefit of the publick. This advice was unanimously approved of, and the senate passed a decree, that ten of the most ancient consular senators should be appointed commissioners to carry this scheme into execution. This decree at once pacified the people and ruined Cassius. For as he had proposed to divide two thirds of the lands between the Latins and Hernici, whose assistance he at that time courted, the people gave him up to the resentment of the senate, who condemned him for plotting to introduce a single tyranny, and ordered him to be thrown down the Tarpeian precipice. This was the first rise of the famous agrarian law, which occasioned such frequent contests between the senate and the people, and stirred up the first civil war in Rome, which ended in the murder of both the Gracchi, about three hundred and fifty years after. For the senate not only evaded the nomination of the commissioners, as they had promised in their decree, but, whenever that affair was brought upon the carpet, they acted with an insincerity and artifice which are highly inconsistent with the so much vaunted probity of the Roman senate. Unless therefore we attend to the true reasons, upon which the agrarian law was originally founded, we can never form a right judgment of the perpetual dissensions between the senate and the tribunes upon that subject. For though the chief blame, in all these contests, is most commonly thrown upon the turbulent and seditious temper of the tribunes, yet, if the real cause of those dissensions is impartially examined, we shall find that most of them took rise from the avarice and injustice of the Patricians. But though the tribunitial power was sometimes made subservient to the interested views of some ambitious tribunes, yet no argument can justly be drawn from the abuse of that power against its real utility. For how much it was dreaded as the bulwark of the liberty of the people, is evident from this consideration: that it was reduced almost to nothing by Sylla, and afterwards totally absorbed by Augustus and the succeeding emperors, who never looked upon the people as thoroughly enslaved until they had annexed the tribunitial power to the imperatorial dignity.