"The patricians arrogated the exclusive enjoyment of the ager publicus; and, like the feudal seigniors, granted some portions of their lands to their dependants,--a wholly precarious concession, revocable at the will of the grantor. The plebeians, on the contrary, were entitled to the enjoyment of only a little pasture-land left to them in common: an utterly unjust state of things, since, in consequence of it, taxation--_census_--weighed more heavily upon the poor than upon the rich. The patrician, in fact, always exempted himself from the tithe which he owed as the price and as the acknowledgment of the concession of domain; and, on the other hand, paid no taxes on his POSSESSIONS, if, as there is good reason to believe, only citizens' property was taxed."--Laboulaye: History of Property. In order thoroughly to understand the preceding quotation, we must know that the estates of CITIZENS--that is, estates independent of the public domain, whether they were obtained in the division of Numa, or had since been sold by the questors--were alone regarded as PROPERTY; upon these a tax, or _cense_, was imposed. On the contrary, the estates obtained by concessions of the public domain, of the ager publicus (for which a light rent was paid), were called POSSESSIONS. Thus, among the Romans, there was a RIGHT OF PROPERTY and a RIGHT OF POSSESSION regulating the administration of all estates. Now, what did the proletaires wish? That the jus possessionis--the simple right of possession--should be extended to them at the expense, as is evident, not of private property, but of the public domain,--agri publici. The proletaires, in short, demanded that they should be tenants of the land which they had conquered. This demand, the patricians in their avarice never would accede to. Buying as much of this land as they could, they afterwards found means of obtaining the rest as POSSESSIONS. Upon this land they employed their slaves. The people, who could not buy, on account of the competition of the rich, nor hire, because--cultivating with their own hands--they could not promise a rent equal to the revenue which the land would yield when cultivated by slaves, were always deprived of possession and property. Civil wars relieved, to some extent, the sufferings of the multitude. "The people enrolled themselves under the banners of the ambitious, in order to obtain by force that which the law refused them,--property. A colony was the reward of a victorious legion. But it was no longer the ager publicus only; it was all Italy that lay at the mercy of the legions. The ager publicus disappeared almost entirely,... but the cause of the evil--accumulated property--became more potent than ever." (Laboulaye: History of Property.)