from very conservative men, such as Quintus Scaevola.  He ventured to overthrow an arrangement as to the elections which had subsisted for a century and a half, and to re-establish the electoral census which had been long obsolete and proscribed.  He ventured practically to withdraw the right of legislation from its two primitive factors, the magistrates and the comitia, and to transfer it to a board which had at no time possessed formally any other privilege in this respect than that of being asked for its advice.(26) Hardly had any democrat ever exercised justice in forms so tyrannical, or disturbed and remodelled the foundations of the constitution with so reckless an audacity, as this conservative reformer.  But if we look at the substance instead of the form, we reach very different results.  Revolutions have nowhere ended, and least of all in Rome, without demanding a certain number of victims, who under forms more or less borrowed from justice atone for the fault of being vanquished as though it were a crime.  Any one who recalls the succession of prosecutions carried on by the victorious party after the fall of the Gracchi and Saturninus(27) will be inclined to yield to the victor of the Esquiline market the praise of candour and comparative moderation, in so far as, first he without ceremony accepted as war what was really such and proscribed the men who were defeated as enemies beyond the pale of the law, and, secondly, he limited as far as possible the number of victims and allowed at least no offensive outbreak of fury against inferior persons.  A similar moderation appears in the political arrangements.  The innovation as respects legislation—­the most important and apparently the most comprehensive—­in fact only brought the letter of the constitution into harmony with its spirit.  The Roman legislation, under which any consul, praetor, or tribune could propose to the burgesses any measure at pleasure and bring it to the vote without debate, had from the first been, irrational and had become daily more so with the growing nullity of the comitia; it was only tolerated, because in practice the senate had claimed for itself the right of previous deliberation and regularly crushed any proposal, if put to the vote without such previous deliberation, by means of the political or religious veto.(28) The revolution hadswept away thesebarriers; andin consequence that absurd system now began fully to develop its results, and to put it in the power of any petulant knave to overthrow the state in due form of law.  What was under such circumstances more natural, more necessary, more truly conservative, than now to recognize formally and expressly the legislation of the senate to which effect had been hitherto given by a circuitous process?  Something similar may be said of the renewal of the electoral census.  The earlier constitution was throughout based on it; even the reform of 513 had merely restricted the privileges of the men of wealth.