war which he had begun as an officer; circumstances gave him no opportunity of trying his skill as a general on tasks really difficult. Scipio was not, any more than his father, a man of brilliant gifts--as is indicated by the very fact of his predilection for Xenophon, the sober soldier and correct author- but he was an honest and true man, who seemed pre-eminently called to stem the incipient decay by organic reforms. All the more significant is the fact that he did not attempt it. It is true that he helped, as he had opportunity and means, to redress or prevent abuses, and laboured in particular at the improvement of the administration of justice. It was chiefly by his assistance that Lucius Cassius, an able man of the old Roman austerity and uprightness, was enabled to carry against the most vehement opposition of the Optimates his law as to voting, which introduced vote by ballot for those popular tribunals which still embraced the most important part of the criminal jurisdiction.(23) In like manner, although he had not chosen to take part in boyish impeachments, he himself in his mature years put upon their trial several of the guiltiest of the aristocracy. In a like spirit, when commanding before Carthage and Numantia, he drove forth the women and priests to the gates of the camp, and subjected the rabble of soldiers once more to the iron yoke of the old military discipline; and when censor (612), he cleared away the smooth-chinned coxcombs among the world of quality and in earnest language urged the citizens to adhere more faithfully to the honest customs of their fathers. But no one, and least of all he himself, could fail to see that increased stringency in the administration of justice and isolated interference were not even first steps towards the healing of the organic evils under which the state laboured. These Scipio did not touch. Gaius Laelius (consul in 614), Scipio's elder friend and his political instructor and confidant, had conceived the plan of proposing the resumption of the Italian domain-land which had not been given away but had been temporarily occupied, and of giving relief by its distribution to the visibly decaying Italian farmers; but he desisted from the project when he saw what a storm he was going to raise, and was thenceforth named the "Judicious." Scipio was of the same opinion. He was fully persuaded of the greatness of the evil, and with a courage deserving of honour he without respect of persons remorselessly assailed it and carried his point, where he risked himself alone; but he was also persuaded that the country could only be relieved at the price of a revolution similar to that which in the fourth and fifth centuries had sprung out of the question of reform, and, rightly or wrongly, the remedy seemed to him worse than the disease. So with the small circle of his friends he held a middle position between the aristocrats, who never forgave him for his advocacy