On the one hand, the great families discovered that they had entered upon the possession of a magnificent property, which they were not disposed to share with an indefinite number of partners; on the other hand, they felt that owing to the influx of numbers they had lost their grip of the electorate, for the men who came to vote from outlying towns were often sheep without a shepherd. It proved, however, impossible to keep the electorate restricted. Rome herself could not supply the armies necessary to carry on the career of conquest upon which she had embarked; she was forced to depend upon allies to supply the men whom she organized, and she was forced in various ways to pay the price. One form of payment was the citizenship, which enabled the Samnite or other Italian soldier to come to Rome for the elections, and extort extra payment for his military services; whether he was feasted, or amused, or actually paid for his vote, he shared with his Roman fellow-soldier in the spoil of the provinces which he had helped to conquer. Every fresh concession of citizenship rendered the electorate more unwieldy, till the Roman people of whose favours Cicero so often boasts had become little better than a mob. While the Roman Electorate was thus outgrowing all possible organization, and the constitution of a city state was breaking down in every direction under the weight of burdens which it was not constructed to carry, the minds of liberal statesmen at Rome were unhappily occupied largely with city constitutions. The enlightened circle of the Roman nobility, which was represented by such men as Scipio Æmilianus, studied the Greek political writers rather than the events which were going on around them, and were tempted to see in the creation of a really democratic constitution the remedy for the disorders which were only too obvious. They were liberal in one sense, but it was in terms of the city state, which no longer existed.