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Caesar: a Sketch by James Anthony Froude
page 84 of 491 (17%)

Patricians and plebeians, aristocrats and democrats, have alike stained
their hands with blood in the working out of the problem of politics. But
impartial history declares also that the crimes of the popular party have
in all ages been the lighter in degree, while in themselves they have more
to excuse them; and if the violent acts of revolutionists have been held
up more conspicuously for condemnation, it has been only because the fate
of noblemen and gentlemen has been more impressive to the imagination than
the fate of the peasant or the artisan. But the endurance of the
inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society. When the
people complain, said Mirabeau, the people are always right. The popular
cause has been the cause of the laborer struggling for a right to live and
breathe and think as a man. Aristocracies fight for wealth and power,
wealth which they waste upon luxury, and power which they abuse for
their own interests. Yet the cruelties of Marius were as far exceeded by
the cruelties of Sylla as the insurrection of the beggars of Holland was
exceeded by the bloody tribunal of the Duke of Alva, or as "the horrors of
the French Revolution" were exceeded by the massacre of the Huguenots two
hundred years before, for which the Revolution was the expiatory
atonement.

Four thousand seven hundred persons fell in the proscription of Sylla, all
men of education and fortune. The real crime of many of them was the
possession of an estate or a wife which a relative or a neighbor coveted.
The crime alleged against all was the opinion that the people of Rome and
Italy had rights which deserved consideration as well as the senators and
nobles. The liberal party were extinguished in their own blood. Their
estates were partitioned into a hundred and twenty thousand allotments,
which were distributed among Sylla's friends, or soldiers, or freedmen.
The land reform of the Gracchi was mockingly adopted to create a permanent
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