Cassius, nor Licinius Stolo, nor the Gracchi, nor any other Roman whose
name is identified with the Agrarian legislation of his country, was
a destructive, or leveller. Quite the contrary; they were all
conservatives,--using that word in its best sense,--and the friends of
property. The lands to which their laws applied, or were intended to
apply, were public lands, answering, in some sense, to those which are
owned by the United States. When Spurius Cassius, a quarter of a century
after that revolution which is known as the expulsion of the Tarquins,
proposed a division of a portion of the public land among the poor
commons, he did no more than had often been done by the Roman kings,
with good effect, and with strict legality. Much of the public land was
_occupied_ by wealthy men, as tenants of the state; and some of these
his law would have ousted from profitable spots, while the rest were to
be forced to pay their rents, which they had done very irregularly or
not at all. The operation of all Agrarian laws like that of Cassius was,
undoubtedly, a matter well to be considered; for, after a man has long
occupied a piece of land, he regards it as an act of injustice to be
peremptorily removed therefrom, and he ought to have, at least, the
privilege of buying it, if its possession be necessary to his support.
This feeling must have been the stronger in the bosom of the Roman
occupant in proportion to his poverty, but to legal possession he could
make no claim. The position he held was that of tenant at will to the
state, and he could be legally ejected at any moment. But it was not
from poor occupants of the public domain, whose number was necessarily
small, that opposition was experienced. It came from the rich, who had
all but monopolized the use of that domain; and, in the time of Spurius
Cassius, it was complicated with that quarrel of _caste_ which we
denominate the contest between the Patricians and the Plebeians.
Property and political power were both involved in the dispute. The
Patricians knew that the success of Cassius would make against them in