The Agrarian contests of that people were among the most interesting incidents in their wonderful career, and are full of instruction, though, until recently, their true character was not understood; and their explanation affords a capital warning against the effects of partisan literature.  The common belief was,—­perhaps we should say is,—­that the supporters of the Agrarian laws were, to use a modern term, destructives; that they aimed at formal divisions of all landed property, if not of all property, among the whole body of the Roman people.  Nothing can be more unfounded than this view of the subject, which is precisely the reverse of the truth.  No Roman, whose name is associated with Agrarian laws, ever thought of touching private property, or of meddling with it, illegally, in any way.  Neither Spurius Cassius, nor Licinius Stolo, nor the Gracchi, nor any other Roman whose name is identified with the Agrarian legislation of his country, was a destructive, or leveller.  Quite the contrary; they were all conservatives,—­using that word in its best sense,—­and the friends of property.  The lands to which their laws applied, or were intended to apply, were public lands, answering, in some sense, to those which are owned by the United States.  When Spurius Cassius, a quarter of a century after that revolution which is known as the expulsion of the Tarquins, proposed a division of a portion of the public land among the poor commons, he did no more than had often been done by the Roman kings, with good effect, and with strict legality.  Much of the public land was occupied by wealthy men, as tenants of the state; and some of these his law would have ousted from profitable spots, while the rest were to be forced to pay their rents, which they had done very irregularly or not at all.  The operation of all Agrarian laws like that of Cassius was, undoubtedly, a matter well to be considered; for, after a man has long occupied a piece of land, he regards it as an act of injustice to be peremptorily removed therefrom, and he ought to have, at least, the privilege of buying it, if its possession be necessary to his support.  This feeling must have been the stronger in the bosom of the Roman occupant in proportion to his poverty, but to legal possession he could make no claim.  The position he held was that of tenant at will to the state, and he could be legally ejected at any moment.  But it was not from poor occupants of the public domain, whose number was necessarily small, that opposition was experienced.  It came from the rich, who had all but monopolized the use of that domain; and, in the time of Spurius Cassius, it was complicated with that quarrel of caste which we denominate the contest between the Patricians and the Plebeians.  Property and political power were both involved in the dispute.  The Patricians knew that the success of Cassius would make against them in two ways:—­it would strengthen the Plebeians, by lifting them out of the degradation consequent on poverty, and so render them more dangerous antagonists in political warfare; and it would render the Patricians less able to contend with aspiring foes, by taking from them one of the sources of their wealth.  Cassius failed, and was executed, having been tried and condemned by the Patricians, who then alone constituted the Roman people.