unprofitable effort to recall the past or anticipate the future. But the
collective effect of his separate efforts has been subjected to very
different interpretations, and the question has been further complicated
by hazardous, and sometimes overconfident, attempts to determine how far
the legislator's intentions were fulfilled in the actual result of his
reforms. Because it can be shown that the changes introduced by
Gracchus, or, to be more strictly accurate, the symptoms which elicited
these changes, ultimately led to monarchical rule, Gracchus has been at
times regarded as the conscious author and possessor of a personal
supremacy which he deliberately intended should replace the intricate
and somewhat cumbrous mechanism which controlled the constitutional
government of Rome; because he sowed the seeds of a discord so terrible
as to be unendurable even in a state which had never known the absence
of faction and conflict, and had preserved its liberties through
carefully regulated strife, his work has been held to be that of some
avenging angel who came, not to renew, but to destroy. There is truth in
both these pictures; but the Gracchus whom they portray as the force
that annihilated centuries of crafty workmanship, as the first precursor
of the coming monarchy, is the Gracchus who rightly lives in the
historic imagination which, unfettered by conditions of space or time,
prefers the contemplation of the eternity of the work to that of the
environment of the worker; it is a presentment which would be applicable
to any man as able and as resolute as Gracchus, who attempted to meet
the evils created by a weak and irresponsible administration, partly by
the restoration of old forms, partly by the recognition of new and
pressing claims. There is a point at which reform, except it go so far
as to blot out a constitution and substitute another in its place, must
act as a weakening and dissolving force. That point is reached when an
existing government is effectually hampered from exercising the
prerogatives of sovereignty and no other power is sufficiently
strengthened to act as its unquestioned substitute. The dissolution will
be easier if reform bears the not uncommon aspect of conservatism, and a
nominal sovereign, whose strength, never very great, has been sapped by
disuse and the habit of mechanical obedience, is placed in competition
with a somewhat effete usurper. It is not, however, fair to regard
Gracchus as a radical reactionary who was the first to drag a prisoned
and incapable sovereign into the light of day. Had he done this, he
would have been the author of a revolution and the creator of a new
constitution. But this he never attempted to be, and such a view of his
work rests on the mistaken impression that, at the time of his reforms,
the senate was recognised as the true government of Rome. Such a
pretension had never been published nor accepted. We are not concerned
with its reality as a fact; but no sound analysis, whether undertaken by
lawyer or historian, would have admitted its theoretical truth. The
literary atmosphere teemed with theories of popular sovereignty of a
limited kind, and Gracchus, while recognising this sovereignty, did
little to remove its limitations. It is true that, like his brother, he
legislated without seeking the customary sanction of the senate; but
initial reforms could never have been carried through, had the
legislator waited for this sanction; and the future freedom of the
Comitia from senatorial control was at best guaranteed by the force of
the example of the Gracchi, not by any new legal ordinances which they
ordained. Earlier precedents of the same type had not been lacking, and
it was only the comprehensiveness of the Gracchan legislation which
seemed to give a new impetus to the view that in all fundamental
matters, which called for regulation by Act of Parliament, the people
was the single and uncontrolled sovereign. Thus was developed the idea
of the possibility of a new period of growth, which should refashion the
details of the structure of the State into greater correspondence with