Line 27. Land given in compensation out of public land, to be _privatus utei quoi optuma lege_.
Line 27. Land taken in this way from private ownership to be _publicus_, as in 133.
Lines 27-28. Land given in compensation for _ager patritus_ to be itself _patritus_.
Line 28. Public roads to remain as before.
Line 29. Whatever Latins and _peregrini_ might do in 112, and whatever is not forbidden citizens to do by this law, they may do henceforward.
Lines 29-30. Trial of a Latin to be the same as for a Roman citizen.
Lines 31-32. Territory (1) of borough towns or colonies (2), in trientabulis, to be, as before, public.
Lines 33-34. Cases of dispute about land made private between 133 and 111, or by this law, to be judged by the consul or praetor before next Ides of March.
Lines 35-36. Cases of dispute after this date to be tried by consuls, praetors, or censors.
Lines 36-39. Judgment on money owing to publicani to be given by consuls, proconsuls, praetors or propraetors.
Line 40. No one to be prejudiced by refusing to swear to laws contrary to this law.
Lines 41-42. No one to be prejudiced by refusing to obey laws contrary to this law.
Lines 43-44. On the colony of Sipontum (?).
Thus we see that the _lex Thoria_ had two main objects in view: (1) The guaranteeing to possessors full property in the land which they occupied. (2) The freeing from _vectigal_ or _scriptura_ the property of every one.
In this way was the reaction of the aristocracy completed. It left nothing of the Sempronian law. Appian[31] has fully comprehended all this, and, in his enumeration of the three laws, connection between which he indicates, we see clearly the entire revolutionary system, conducted, we must admit, with a rare address and a perfidy which rendered the effect certain. The aristocracy did not rest. As soon as they had gained the people by their new bait of money and food, soothed them by their apparent generosity, and familiarized them with the idea that the _possessions_ of the nobles were not only legally acquired but inviolable, then they raised the mask, and by a bold step swept away the _vectigal_,[32] thus leaving their property free. The enactment of this law virtually closed the long struggle between patrician and plebeian over the public lands of Rome, and left them as full property in the hands of the rich nobility. The results could hardly have been otherwise. Sumptuary laws, false economic principles, had closed all channels[33] of trade and manufacture to the nobility, while conquest had filled their hands with gold and placed at their disposal vast numbers[34] of slaves. There was but one channel open for the investment of this gold,--the agrarian.[35] Farming and cattle-raising were the only occupations in which slaves could be used with advantage and so, as a natural result of Roman economics, the plebeian, with little or no money and subject to the military call, was compelled to enter into a one-sided contest with capital and slave labor. So long as these conditions existed so long would all the laws of the world fail to save him from abject poverty and its attendant evils.