was given to poor farmers by a clause, that in future a man might only graze ten large and fifty smaller beasts on the pastures of what still remained public land. By this law the jurisdiction over land which had been assigned by the triumvirs was given to the consuls, censors, and praetors, the jurisdiction over cases in which disputes with the publicani required settlement being granted to the consuls, praetors, and, as such cases would occur chiefly in the provinces which were mostly under propraetors, to propraetors also. [Sidenote: Pernicious results of the reaction.] The results of this reactionary legislation are partly summed up by Appian, when he attributes to it a dearth of citizens, soldiers, and revenue. To our eyes its effects are clearer still. Slave labour and slave-discontent, 'latifundia,' decrease of population, depreciation of the land, received a fresh impetus, and the triumphant optimates pushed the State step by step further down the road to ruin. For the end for which they struggled was not the good of Italy, much less of the world, but the supremacy of Rome in Italy, and of themselves in Rome. Wealth and office were shared by an ever narrowing circle. Ten years after the passing of the Baebian law, it was said that among all the citizens there were only 2,000 wealthy families. And between the years 123 and 109 B.C. four sons and probably two nephews of Quintus Metellus gained the consulship, five of the six gained triumphs, and one was censor, while he himself had filled all the highest offices of the State. Thus, as Sallust says, the nobles passed on the chief dignities from hand to hand. There must have been many of the Gracchan party, now left without a head, who burned for deliverance from such despicable masters. But they were for the time disorganized and cowed. [Sidenote: Caius Marius.] There was one man whom Scipio Aemilianus was said to have pointed out in the Numantine war as capable, if he himself died, of taking his place; and the rough soldier had already come forward as a politician, on the one hand checking the optimates by protecting the secrecy and efficiency of the ballot, and on the other defying the mob by opposing a distribution of corn; but for the present no one could tell how far he would or could go, and though he had already been made praetor, the Metelli could as yet afford to despise him. The death of Caius prolonged the Senate's misrule for twenty years. Twenty years of shame at home and abroad--the turpitude of the Jugurthine war--a second and more stubborn slave revolt in Sicily--the apparition of the Northern hordes inflicting disaster after disaster upon the Roman armies, which in 105 B.C. culminated in another and more appalling Cannae--these things had yet to come about before the cup of the Senate's infamy was full, and before those who had drawn the sword against the Gracchi perished by the sword of Marius, impotent, unpitied, and despised. * * * * *