As for the mass of the town people, slave or free, which ought on common-sense principles to have been employed either in industry or on the land, it was by a series of hand-to-mouth measures on the part of the government, and by the operation of ordinary self-interest on the part of the rich class, made age by age more unproductive industrially and more worthless politically. Despite such a reform as the Licinian law of 367 B.C.,[183] which for a time seems to have restored a yeoman class to the State and greatly developed its fighting power, the forces of outside competition and of capitalism gradually ousted the yeomen cultivators all over Italy, leaving the land mainly in the hands of the patricians and financiers of the city, who exploited it either by slave labour or by grinding down the former cultivators as tenants. Even on this footing, a certain amount of industry would be forced on the towns. But not only was that also largely in the hands of slave-masters, with the result that demotic life everywhere was kept on the lowest possible plane: the emperors gradually adopted on humane grounds a policy which demoralised nearly all that was left of sound citizenship. As of old, monarchy in the hands of the more rational and conscientious men tended to seek for the mass of the people some protection as against the upper class; and the taxes and customs laid on by Augustus, to the disgust of the Senate, were an effort in this direction. But this was rather negative than positive protection, and the effort inevitably went further. In the last rally of what may be termed conscientious aristocratic republicanism, such as it was, we find Caius Gracchus, as tribune, helping the plebs by causing grain to be sold at a half or a fourth of its market value--an expedient pathetically expressive of the hopeless distance that then lay between public spirit and social science. Both of the Gracchi sought by violent legal measures to wring the appropriated public lands from the hands of the rich, with the inevitable result of raising against themselves a host of powerful enemies. The needed change could not be so effected. But even if it had been, it could not have endured. The Greek advisers of Tiberius Gracchus, Blossius of Cumæ and Diophanes of Mitylene,[184] looked solely to redistribution, taking for granted the permanence of slavery, the deadliest of all inequalities. The one way, if there were any, in which the people could be saved was by a raising of their social status; and that was impossible without an arrest of slavery and a cessation of extorted tribute. But no Roman thinker save the Gracchi and their predecessors and imitators seems ever to have dreamt of the former, and no one contemplated the latter remedy. Least of all were the Roman ruling class likely to think of either; and though Tiberius Gracchus did avowedly seek to substitute free for slave labour,[185] and wrought to