They were as well educated, they were as wealthy, they were as capable as
the inhabitants of the dominant State. They paid taxes, they fought in the
armies; they were strong; they were less corrupt, politically and morally,
as having fewer temptations and fewer opportunities of evil; and in their
simple country life they approached incomparably nearer to the old Roman
type than the patrician fops in the circus or the Forum, or the city mob
which was fed in idleness on free grants of corn. When Samnium and Tuscany
were conquered, a third of the lands had been confiscated to the Roman
State, under the name of _Ager Publicus_. Samnite and Etruscan
gentlemen had recovered part of it under lease, much as the descendants of
the Irish chiefs held their ancestral domains as tenants of the
Cromwellians. The land law of the Gracchi was well intended, but it bore
hard on many of the leading provincials, who had seen their estates
parcelled out, and their own property, as they deemed it, taken from them
under the land commission. If they were to be governed by Roman laws, they
naturally demanded to be consulted when the laws were made. They might
have been content under a despotism to which Roman and Italian were
subject alike. To be governed under the forms of a free constitution by
men no better than themselves was naturally intolerable.

[Sidenote: B.C. 95.]
[Sidenote: B.C. 91.]
The movement from without united the Romans for the instant in defence of
their privileges. The aristocracy resisted change from instinct; the mob,
loudly as they clamored for their own rights, cared nothing for the rights
of others, and the answer to the petition of the Italians, five years
after the defeat of the Cimbri, was a fierce refusal to permit the
discussion of it. Livius Drusus, one of those unfortunately gifted men who
can see that in a quarrel there is sometimes justice on both sides, made a
vain attempt to secure the provincials a hearing, but he was murdered in