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These movements were all in the direction of increasing popular and democratic power, and the work of the Gracchi tended to the extension of political freedom. The power of Gracchus rested on the mercantile class and the proletariat; primarily on the latter, which in this conflict wherein neither side had any military reserve acted, as it were, the part of an army.
Notwithstanding the fate of the Gracchi and their friends, Memmius, a tribune, was found bold enough to tell the people that there were men in the Senate who had taken bribes. The Senate, conscious of its guilt, was now obliged to exert itself. War was declared against Jugurtha, and a consul was sent to Africa with an army.
As a Cæsar and a Marius sprung from the blood of the Gracchi, there would have been no Corsican exterminator for France, had there been no French exterminators for Corsica. There are surely times when fate plays with mortals, making of the murder of a generation or the revolution of an empire a nursery game of coincidences!
Let me go with my children to the National Assembly, as she did to the Hungarian Senate, with my Imperial brother, Joseph, in her arms and Leopold in her womb, when Charles the Seventh of Bavaria had deprived her of all her German dominions, and she had already written to the Duchesse de Lorraine to prepare her an asylum, not knowing where she should be delivered of the precious charge she was then bearing; but I, like the mother of the Gracchi, like Cornelia, more esteemed for my birth than for my marriage, am the wife of the King of France, and I see we shall be murdered in our beds for the want of our own exertions!
Perhaps the dissatisfaction with the senatorial government was not now less than it was then; but several of the hopes, which had brought to the Gracchi their most faithful adherents, had in the meanwhile been recognized as illusory, and there had sprung up in many minds a misgiving that this Gracchan agitation tended towards an issue whither a very large portion of the discontented were by no means willing to follow it.
His entire efforts were directed to the combination in a solid phalanx of the equestrian and patrician orders. The danger to society, he had come to think, was an approaching war against property, and his hope was to unite the rich of both classes in defence against the landless and moneyless multitudes. The land question had become again as pressing as in the time of the Gracchi.
It is true that both the opposition and the section of the conservatives that entered into ideas of reform worked energetically to counteract the evil; the two Gracchi, by carrying out the distribution of almost the whole domain land, gave to the state 80,000 new Italian farmers; Sulla, by settling 120,000 colonists in Italy, filled up at least in part the gaps which the revolution and he himself had made in the ranks of the Italian yeomen.
In a Roman town, Marcella there's something very Roman about you you're like the mother of the Gracchi. I happen to know all about the mother of the Gracchi because it came in my Latin translation at Matric, and I had such a devil of a job with it that I never forgot it.
It is in latent caloric, if I may borrow a philosophical expression, that many of the noblest hearts give out the life that warms them. Cornelia's lips grow white, and her pulse hardly warms her thin fingers, but she has melted all the ice out of the hearts of those young Gracchi, and her lost heat is in the blood of her youthful heroes.
Was not the Forum at once the market, the exchange, the tribunal, the open-air hall of public meeting? The Gracchi there defended the cause of the humble; Sylla there set up the lists of those whom he proscribed; Cicero there spoke, and there, against the rostra, his bleeding head was hung.
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