of her neighbours, then, of Italy, and lastly of the world, there went
on a succession of internal changes, which first transformed a pure
oligarchy into a plutocracy, and secondly overthrew this modified form
of oligarchy, and substituted Caesarism. With the earlier of these
changes we are concerned here but little. The political revolution was
over when the social revolution which we have to record began. But the
roots of the social revolution were of deep growth, and were in fact
sometimes identical with those of the political revolution. [Sidenote:
Parallel between Roman and English history.] Englishmen can understand
such an intermixture the more readily from the analogies, more or less
close, which their own history supplies. They have had a monarchy.
They have been ruled by an oligarchy, which has first confronted and
then coalesced with the moneyed class, and the united orders have been
forced to yield theoretical equality to almost the entire nation,
while still retaining real authority in their own hands. They have
seen a middle class coquetting with a lower class in order to force
an upper class to share with it its privileges, and an upper class
resorting in its turn to the same alliance; and they may have noted
something more than a superficial resemblance between the tactics
of the patres and nobiles of Rome and our own magnates of birth and
commerce. Even now they are witnessing the displacement of political
by social questions, and, it is to be hoped, the successful solution
of problems which in the earlier stages of society have defied the
efforts of every statesman. Yet they know that, underlying all the
political struggles of their history, questions connected with
the rights and interests of rich and poor, capitalist and toiler,
land-owner and land-cultivator, have always been silently and
sometimes violently agitated. Political emancipation has enabled
social discontent to organize itself and find permanent utterance, and
we are to-day facing some of the demands to satisfy which the Gracchi