drugs, they drave out one devil by bringing in a score, and paid for the partial healing of an incurable disease by destroying for ever the balance of the constitution, and inaugurating with their own martyr blood one of the most woeful epochs in human history--an epoch varied by periodical assassinations and consummated by wholesale butcheries. I said the Gracchi attained their object, and that by appointing a Commission for a distribution of the public lands, such as the friends of the crofters in the Highlands now propose for the repeopling of the old depopulated homes of the clan. But I said also that the disease under which Rome laboured was incurable. How was this? Simply because, whatever might have been the merits of the special Agrarian Law carried by the Gracchi, the violent steam by which the State machine was moved remained the same, the clumsy machine itself remained, and the materials with which it had to deal in a long and critical course of foreign conquest became every year larger and more unmanageable. It was not to be expected either, on the one hand, that a strong and influential aristocracy should die with a single kick, or, on the other, that a democracy, which had once learned the power of a popular flood to break down aristocratic dams, would cease to exercise that power when a convenient occasion offered. And so the strife of oligarchic and plebeian factions continued. The political struggle, as always happens in such cases, became a struggle for personal supremacy; the sanguinary street battle between the younger Gracchus and the Consul Opimius, though followed by a lull for a season, was renewed after a few years in more startling form and much bloodier issues, first between Marius and Sulla, and finally between Cæsar and Pompey. Such a succession of embittered civil wars could end only in exhaustion and submission; and this is the last emphatic lesson which the history of Rome has taught to the governors of the people. Every constitution of mixed aristocratic and democratic elements which fails by kindly control on the one side, and reasonable demand on the other, to achieve that balance of those antagonising forces which means good government, must end in a military despotism. That which will not bridle itself must be bridled; and when constant irritation, fretful jars, and cruel collisions are the bloody fruit of unchastened liberty, slavery and stagnation seem not too high a price to pay for peace.