"He is usually extolled as a patriot who would not stir to humour a Roman rabble, but who, when downtrodden honest farmers, his comrades in the wars, appealed to him, at once stepped into the arena as their champion. In reality he was a reactionist who, when the inevitable results of those liberal ideas which had been broached in his own circle stared him in the face, seized the first available means of stifling them. The world had moved too fast for him. As censor, instead of beseeching the gods to increase the glory of the State, he begged them to preserve it. Brave as a man, he was a pusillanimous statesman. It was well for his reputation that he died just then. Without Sulla's personal vices he might have played Sulla's part as a politician, and his atrocities in Spain as well as his remark on the death of Tiberius Gracchus--words breathing the very essence of a narrow swordsman's nature--showed that from bloodshed at all events he would not have shrunk. It is hard to respect such a man in spite of all his good qualities. Fortune gave him the opportunity of playing a great part, and he shrank from it. When the crop sprang up which he had himself helped to sow, he blighted it. But because he was personally respectable, and because he held a middle course between contemporary parties, he has found favour with historians, who are too apt to forget that there is in politics, as in other things, a right course and a wrong, and that to attempt to walk along both at once proves a man to be a weak statesman, and does not prove him to be a great or good man." The fillers in, who had occupied the stage of Roman politics for the years following the murder of Tiberius Gracchus, were now removed, and the stage was being rapidly set for the second and final act of the great historical tragedy of the Gracchi. The political problems which confronted Rome at the time of the death of Scipio rapidly reached such an acute state that it became evident the solution of these problems, and the preservation of the Roman republic, must be the work of a Man, not of a manikin or a demagogue. At this crisis Rome was blessed with the best of fortune, only to be immediately thereafter cursed with the worst of misfortune. The good fortune consisted in the fact that at this time the man presented himself for the work; the bad fortune arose from the refusal of Rome to avail herself of his work.