From what little we know about such work of reform as Cæsar had time for, we may take it as certain that these deluded assassins made a sad blunder. Cæsar’s legislative work was fragmentary, but every item of it shows intelligence and political insight. He did not attempt to turn out a new constitution in black and white; he did the work of government mainly himself for the time being, and we do not know how he meant to provide for it after his death. In the most important matter of all, the adjustment of the Empire to the home government, and especially the subordination of the provincial governors to a central authority, he forestalled the imperial system of the future: he made himself the central authority, to whom the governors were to be responsible. The other most important question of government, that of the power and composition of the Senate, he answered by raising the number of Senators to 900, as Gaius Gracchus had wished to do, and thus destroying the power of the old narrow oligarchical cliques. But perhaps his practical wisdom is best seen in his economic legislation for Rome and Italy. He was the first statesman to try and check the over-abundance of slave-labour; the first, too, to lay the foundation of a reasonable bankruptcy law. He regulated the corn-supply in the city, and brought down the number of recipients of corn-doles to less than one-half of what it had lately been. Again, he laid down general rules for the qualification of candidates for municipal office in Italy, and arranged for the taking of a census in all the cities every five years, the records of which were to be deposited at Rome. It would seem as if he meant to work out the enfranchisement of Italy to its natural conclusion: for he not only completed it by extending it to the Alps, which had never yet been done, but went beyond the bounds of Italy, offering the citizenship freely both to Gauls and Sicilians.