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The termination of the struggles between the old and new burgesses, the various and comparatively successful endeavours to relieve the middle class, and the germs - already making their appearance amidst the newly acquired civic equality - of the formation of a new aristocratic and a new democratic party, have thus been passed in review. It remains that we describe the shape which the new government assumed amidst these changes, and the positions in which after the political abolition of the nobility the three elements of the republican commonwealth - the burgesses, the magistrates, and the senate - stood towards each other.
The burgesses in their ordinary assemblies continued as hitherto to be the highest authority in the commonwealth and the legal sovereign. But it was settled by law that - apart from the matters committed once for all to the decision of the centuries, such as the election of consuls and censors - voting by districts should be just as valid as voting by centuries: a regulation introduced as regards the patricio-plebeian assembly by the Valerio-Horatian law of 305[12] and extended by the Publilian law of 415, but enacted as regards the plebeian separate assembly by the Hortensian law about 467[13]. We have already noticed that the same individuals, on the whole, were entitled to vote in both assemblies, but that - apart from the exclusion of the patricians from the plebeian separate assembly - in the general assembly of the districts all entitled to vote were on a footing of equality, while in the centuriate comitia the working of the suffrage was graduated with reference to the means of the voters, and in so far, therefore, the change was certainly a levelling and democratic i
The powers of the comitia exhibited during this period a tendency to enlarge their range, but in a ma
But notwithstanding these enlargements of the powers of the burgess-assemblies, their practical influence on state affairs began, particularly towards the close of this period, to wane. First of all, the extension of the bounds of Rome deprived her primary assembly of its true basis. As an assembly of the freeholders of the community, it formerly might very well meet in sufficiently full numbers, and might very well know its own wishes, even without discussion; but the Roman burgess-body had now become less a civic community than a state. The fact that those dwelling together voted also with each other, no doubt, introduced into the Roman comitia, at least when the voting was by tribes, a sort of inward co