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covery and general adoption of the principles of self-government, without the assistance of the Printing-Press: but this, no doubt, will be conceded, that the period of such discovery and adoption, must have been greatly more protracted than it otherwise has been.
There may be those, among my readers, who may think it extraordinary, that there could have been found among the Roman people, such a number of partizans or advocates, in favor of the Agrarian Law, as, on its operation being denied or obstructed, to lead to the most violent political convulsions. But these should recollect the peculiar nature of their condition. Having no commerce worth mentioning, nor arts or manufactures of any kind, save those carried on, in a domestic or family way, and that in the rudest manner known to all nations, as they emerge from barbarity into a state of civil government, if so it may be called, they had no means to sustain themselves, but by the labors of agriculture. To deny them land, then, was to deny them life; or to compel them, to purchase its support, of the rich, at a price, or on conditions which rendered it scarcely worth preserving.
That we may fully understand the relation in which the Roman people stood to their government, we have only to imagine that, here, in the State of New-York, the same state of things exists; agriculture only supporting life; com
