judicial system—­which every well-ordered state will endeavour as far as possible to place, if not above political parties, at any rate aloof from them—­into the midst of the whirlpool of revolution.  Certainly the blame of these conflicting tendencies in Gaius Gracchus is chargeable to a very great extent on his position rather than on himself personally.  On the very threshold of the -tyrannis- he was confronted by the fatal dilemma, moral and political, that the same man had at one and the same time to maintain his ground, we may say, as a robber-chieftain and to lead the state as its first citizen—­a dilemma to which Pericles, Caesar, and Napoleon had also to make dangerous sacrifices.  But the conduct of Gaius Gracchus cannot be wholly explained from this necessity; along with it there worked in him the consuming passion, the glowing revenge, which foreseeing its own destruction hurls the firebrand into the house of the foe.  He has himself expressed what he thought of his ordinance as to the jurymen and similar measures intended to divide the aristocracy; he called them daggers which he had thrown into the Forum that the burgesses—­the men of rank, obviously—­might lacerate each other with them.  He was a political incendiary.  Not only was the hundred years’ revolution which dates from him, so far as it was one man’s work, the work of Gaius Gracchus, but he was above all the true founder of that terrible urban proletariate flattered and paid by the classes above it, which through its aggregation in the capital—­the natural consequence of the largesses of corn—­became at once utterly demoralized and aware of its power, and which—­with its demands, sometimes stupid, sometimes knavish, and its talk of the sovereignty of the people—­lay like an incubus for five hundred years upon the Roman commonwealth and only perished along with it And yet—­this greatest of political transgressors was in turn the regenerator of his country.  There is scarce a structural idea in Roman monarchy, which is not traceable to Gaius Gracchus.  From him proceeded the maxim—­founded doubtless in a certain sense in the nature of the old traditional laws of war, but yet, in the extension and practical application now given to it, foreign to the older state-law—­that all the land of the subject communities was to be regarded as the private property of the state; a maxim, which was primarily employed to vindicate the right of the state to tax that land at pleasure, as was the case in Asia, or to apply it for the institution of colonies, as was done in Africa, and which became afterwards a fundamental principle of law under the empire.  From him proceeded the tactics, whereby demagogues and tyrants, leaning for support on material interests, break down the governing Aristocracy, but subsequently legitimize the change of constitution by substituting a strict and efficient administration for the previous misgovernment.  To him, in particular, are traceable the first steps towards such a reconciliation between