The permanence of the land commission was the most important result of the senate's determination to detach the political from the economic consequences of the Gracchan movement.[437] But they tolerated rather than accepted it. Had they wished to make it their own, every nerve would have been strained to secure the three places at the annual elections for men who represented the true spirit of the nobility. But there was every reason for allowing the people's representatives to continue the people's work. The commission was an experiment, and the government did not wish to participate in possible failure; a seasonable opportunity might arise for suspending or neutralising its activities, and the senate did not wish to reverse its own work; whether success or failure attended its operations, the task of the commissioners was sure to arouse fears and excite odium, especially amongst the Italian allies; and the nobility were less inclined to excite such sentiments than to turn them to account. So the people were allowed year after year to perpetuate the Gracchan clique and to replace its members by avowed sympathisers with programmes of reform. Tiberius's place was filled by Crassus, whose daughter Licinia was wedded to Caius Gracchus.[438] Two places were soon vacated by the fall of Crassus in Asia and the death of Appius Claudius. They were filled by Marcus Fulvius Flaccus and Gaius Papirius Carbo.[439] The Former had already proved his sympathy with Gracchus, the latter had Just brought to an end an agitating tribunate, which had produced a successful ballot law and an abortive attempt to render the tribune re-eligible. The personnel of the commission was, therefore, a guarantee of its good faith. Its energy was on a level with its earnestness. The task of annexing and distributing the domain land was strenuously undertaken, and other officials, on whom fell the purely routine function of enforcing the new limit of occupation, seem to have been equally faithful to their work. Even the consul Popillius, one of the presidents of the commission that tried the Gracchan rioters, has left a record of his activity in the words that he was "the first to expel shepherds from their domains and install farmers in their stead".[440] The boundary stones of the commissioners still survive to mark the care with which they defined the limits of occupied land and of the new allotments; and the great increase in the census roll between the years 131 and 125 B.C. finds its best explanation in the steady increase of small landholders effected by the agrarian law. In the former year the register had shown rather less than 319,000 citizens; in the latter the number had risen to somewhat more than 394,000.[441] If this increase of nearly 76,000 referred to the whole citizen body, it would be difficult to connect it with the work of the commission, except on the hypothesis that numerous vagrants, who did not as a rule appear at the census, now presented themselves for assessment; but, when it is remembered that the published census list of Rome merely contained the returns of her effective military strength, and that this consisted merely of the _assidui_, it is clear that a measure which elevated large portions of the _capite censi_ to the position of yeoman farmers must have had the effect of increasing the numbers on the register; and this sudden leap in the census roll may thus be attributed to the successful working of the new agrarian scheme.[442] A result such as this could not have been wholly transitory; in tracing the agrarian legislation of the post-Gracchan period we shall indeed find the trial of experiments which prove that no final solution of the land question had been reached; we shall see the renewal of the process of land absorption which again led to the formation of gigantic estates; but these tendencies may merely mark the inevitable weeding-out of the weaker of the Gracchan colonists; they do not prove that the sturdier folk failed to justify the scheme, to work their new holdings at a profit, and to hand them down to their posterity. It is true that the landless proletariate of the city continued steadily to increase; but the causes which lead to the plethora of an imperial capital are too numerous to permit us to explain this increase by the single hypothesis of a renewed depopulation of the country districts.