"In spite of the labours of recent historians, the legislation of Caius Gracchus is still hard to understand. Where the original authorities contradict each other, as they often do, probable conjecture is the most which can be attained, and no attempt will be made here to specify what were the measures of the first tribunate of Caius, and what of the second. The general scope and tendency of his legislation is clear enough. It was to overthrow the senatorial government, and in the new government to give the chief share of the executive power to the mercantile class, and the chief share of the legislative power to Italians. These were his immediate aims. Probably he meant to keep all the strings he thus set in motion in his own hands, so as to be practically monarch of Rome. But whether he definitely conceived the idea of monarchy, and, looking beyond his own requirements, pictured to himself a successor at some future time inheriting the authority which he had established, no one can say." (Beesly.) "It is clear that he did not wish to place the Roman Republic on a new democratic basis, but that he wished to abolish it, and introduce in its stead an absolute despotism, in the form of an unlimited tribuneship for life. Nor can he be blamed for it; as, though an absolute monarchy is a great misfortune for a nation, it is a less misfortune than an absolute oligarchy. Besides this, he was fired with the passion for a speedy vengeance, and was in fact a political incendiary--the author not only of the one hundred years' revolution, which dates from him, but the founder of that terrible urban proletariat which, utterly demoralized by corn largesses and the flattery of the classes above it, and at the same time conscious of its power, lay like an incubus for five hundred years on the Roman commonwealth, and only perished with it.