A people trained to live chiefly on spoils taken from others must be continually spoiling itself for any peaceful occupation; and those whose chief support is the sword, must be always destroying the food they live upon. When foreign means are exhausted, it becomes necessary to look at home, and those who have existed by robbing strangers, are no sooner deprived of their external sources of support, than they begin to rob each other. Such was the order--or rather the disorder--of things in Rome, where wealth had got into the hands of the few, and the social fabric, like a building too heavy at the top, was in immediate danger of a downfall. There were large classes of persons who were assured that they were perfectly free; but, though enjoying the freedom of air itself, they found in it no element of comfort, when they had nothing more substantial than the air to live upon. Deprived of every inch of land, there was but a flatulent sort of satisfaction in the enjoyment of the atmosphere, nor could the most long-winded of orators impress the people with the idea that life could be maintained by simply imbibing the breath of liberty. They were informed that they were the lords of the earth;[65] but this mockery of respect was simply insulting the emptiness of their mouths by a scarcely less empty title. The plebeians were like a number of ciphers without a preliminary figure, and, though possessing all the materials of strength in their vast body, were powerless until a head could be found for them. This at length appeared in the person of Tib. Sempronius Gracchus, the grandson of the elder Scipio, and as two heads are said to be better than one, Tib. united his brother Caius with him in the office of leader to the great plebeian movement. The elder Gracchus had been tutored by his mother Cornelia--one of the earliest members of the ancient and honourable order of blue-stockings. She had superintended the education of her children, and had personally tutored them in eloquence; an art of which the female tongue is peculiarly capable. Her own house was the resort of some of the first philosophers of the day, who, like many modern philosophers, were thoroughly impressed with the idea that the way to penetrate the youthful mind, is to continue for ever boring it. In this manner the understandings of the young Gracchi had been thoroughly drilled, and the treasures of science had been admitted at so many apertures, that the only fear was lest the treasures, through some of the numerous openings by which they had got into the mind, might find their way out again. [Illustration: _The Mother of the Gracchi._]