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Updated: May 29, 2025
The better classes of society kept aloof more and more from service in the army, and the Roman and Italic middle class in general was disappearing; while on the other hand the considerable military resources of the extra-Italian allies and subjects had become available, and the Italian proletariate also, properly applied, afforded at least a very useful material for military objects.
It was clear that the senate was not powerful enough to wrest either from the merchants or from the proletariate their new privileges; any attempt to assail the corn- laws or the new jury-arrangement would have led, under a somewhat grosser or somewhat more civilized form, to a street-riot in presence of which the senate was utterly defenceless.
The lamentations of a later day over a pauperised proletariate and an exhausted treasury cannot strictly be laid to the account of the original scheme, Except in so far as it served as a precedent; they were the consequence of the action of later demagogues who, instructed by Gracchus as to the mode in which an easy popularity might be secured, introduced laws which sanctioned an almost gratuitous distribution of grain.
This distribution which consequently excluded the burgesses living out of the capital, and could not but attract to Rome the whole mass of the burgess- proletariate was designed to bring the burgess-proletariate of the capital, which hitherto had mainly depended on the aristocracy, into dependence on the leaders of the movement-party, and thus to supply the new master of the state at once with a body-guard and with a firm majority in the comitia.
The ballot, because it had been so easy to annul its effect, had been left in the people's hands; and when, at last, the leaders of the proletariate ceased to counsel strikes, or any form of resistance to the Accumulation that could be tormented into the likeness of insurrection against the government, and began to urge them to attack it in the political way, the deluge that swept the Accumulation out of existence came trickling and creeping over the land.
I know Schurz by name through the papers: he's the author of a dreadful book called "Gold and the Proletariate," or something of that sort a revolutionary work like Tom Paine's "Age of Reason," I believe and he goes about the country now and then, lecturing and agitating, to make money, no doubt, out of the poor, misguided, credulous workmen.
This emigration, however, must have been more than a mere temporary arrangement; Caesar, convinced like every other man of sense that the only true remedy for the misery of the proletariate consisted in a well-regulated system of colonization, and placed by the condition of the empire in a position to realize it to an almost unlimited extent, must have had the design of permanently continuing the process, and so opening up a constant means of abating an evil which was constantly reproducing itself.
You will perhaps be interested to know that it was with the telegraphs that the rebellion against the Accumulation began, and the government was forced, by the overwhelming majority which the proletariate sent to our parliament, to assume a function which the Accumulation had impudently usurped. Then the transportation of smaller and more perishable wares "
The change thus introduced was unquestionably a great one. Hitherto the country voters had been the most independent; now the members of the urban proletariate were equally free, and from this time forth the voice of the city could find an expression uninfluenced by the smiles or frowns of wealthy patrons.
Capua may have pleased them, but they had little liking for a journey across the sea to the site of desolated Carthage. The very modesty of Gracchus's scheme, as shown in the number of the settlements projected and of the colonists who were to find a home in each, proved that it was not intended as a benefit to the proletariate as a whole.
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