man "people," which in itself, like any other, was raw material without form, but to this class which brought Rome into condition and kept her so, willy- nilly — with the result that this particular stream of being, which in 350 was still without importance save to middle Italy, gradually drew into its bed the entire history of the Classical, and made the last great period of that history a Roman period.
It was the very perfection of political flair that was displayed by this small circle (which possessed no sort of public rights) in managing the democratic forms created by the Revolution — forms that here as elsewhere derive all value from the use that is made of them. The only factor in them that if mishandled would have been dangerous in an instant — namely, the interpenetration of two mutually exclusive powers — was handled so superbly and so quietly that it was always the higher experience that gave the note, while the people remained throughout convinced that decisions were made by, and in the sense desired by, itself. To be popular, and yet historically successful in the highest degree — here is the secret of this policy, and for that matter the only possibility of policy existing at all in such times, an art in which the Roman regime has remained unequalled to this day.
Nevertheless, on the other side of the picture, the result of the Revolution was the emancipation of Money. Thenceforward money was master in the Comitia Centuriata. That which called itself "populus" there became more and more a tool in the hands of big money, and it required all the tactical superiority of the ruling circles to maintain a counterpoise in the Plebs, and to keep effective a representation of the yeomanry, under the leadership of the noble families, in the thirty-one country tribes from which the great city mass continued to be excluded. Hence the drastic energy with which the arrangements made by Appius Claudius were revoked. The natural alliance between high finance and the mass, though we see it actually at work later (under the Gracchi and Marius) for the destruction of the tradition of the blood,[1] was at any rate made impossible for many generations. Bourgeoisie and yeomanry, money and landowning, maintained a reciprocal equilibrium of separate organisms, and were held together and made efficient by the State-idea (of which the nobility was the incarnation) until this inward form fell to pieces, and the two tendencies broke apart in enmity. The First Punic War was a traders' war and directed against the agrarian interest, and, therefore, the consul Appius Claudius (a descendant of the great Censor) laid the decision of the matter in 284 before the Comitia Centuriata. The conquest of the Po plain, on the other hand, was in the interests of the peasantry and it was, therefore, in the Comita Tributa that it was carried by the Tribune C. Flaminius — the first genuinely Cæsarian type in Roman history, builder of the Via Flaminia and the Circus Flaminius. But when in pursuance of his policy he (as Censor in 220) forbade the Senators
- ↑ Another instance, among many, is its rôle in preparing the German crash of 1918.
