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But the friend of the proletariate, whenever occasion served, treated the proletariate like a deadly enemy. In seasons of overproduction, as it was called, it locked the workmen out or laid them off, and left their families to starve, or ran light work and claimed the credit of public benefactors for running at all.
Gracchus earnestly laboured to find a remedy for social evils, and to check the spread of pauperism; yet he at the same time intentionally reared up a street proletariate of the worst kind in the capital by his distributions of corn, which were designed to be, and became, a premium to all the lazy and hungry civic rabble.
However offensive was the motley mixture of the parasitic especially the Helleno-Oriental population in Rome, he nowhere opposed its extension; it is significant, that at his popular festivals for the capital he caused dramas to be performed not merely in Latin and Greek, but also in other languages, presumably in Phoenician, Hebrew, Syrian, Spanish. Diminution of the Proletariate
A great proletariate a needy and disaffected lower class was growing up, which boded no good to the state. TIBERIUS GRACCHUS. This condition of things moved Tiberius Gracchus, the son of Cornelia, who was the daughter of the great Scipio Africanus, to bring forward his Agrarian Laws.
Nor was this decay of the state felt as a public misfortune merely perhaps by such as had political rights and public spirit; the insurrection of the proletariate, and the brigandage and piracy which remind us of the times of the Neapolitan Ferdinands, carried the sense of this decay into the remotest valley and the humblest hut of Italy, and made every one who pursued trade and commerce, or who bought even a bushel of wheat, feel it as a personal calamity.
It needed no special wisdom, but merely a recollection of the course of the first social crisis in Rome, to perceive that the only real remedy against an agricultural proletariate consisted in a comprehensive and duly-regulated system of emigration; for which the external relations of Rome offered the most favourable opportunity.
As a compensation for these, Italy obtained on the one hand the proletariate of slaves and freedmen, on the other hand the craftsmen and traders flocking thither from Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, who flourished chiefly in the capital and still more in the seaport towns of Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium.
We can scarcely admit, in the face of facts like these, that the agriculturist created by the Gracchan reforms was likely to render any signal political assistance to his city. It is true that the existence of a practically disfranchised proletariate may have a modifying influence on politics.
It would seem as though the very weaknesses of society might have benefited the lower middle class, and the siftings of the harvest given by the spoils of empire might have more than supplied the needs of a parasitic proletariate.
It opened up for the Italian proletariate a permanent outlet, and a relief in fact more than provisional; but it certainly abandoned the principle of state-law hitherto in force, by which Italy was regarded as exclusively the governing, and the provincial territory as exclusively the governed, land. Modifications of the Penal Law
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