is a decree of the comitia or the concilium. The difference in the legislative powers of the two assemblies came in course of time to be little more than a difference in magisterial right;[1] while the comitia of the centuries and tribes were presided over by magistrates with the imperium, the concilium of the Plebs could be summoned and addressed only by plebeian magistrates. Yet the past history of the various assemblies was decisive as to their elective and judicial functions, and practice tended still further to fix the scope of the powers of each. But at the time of the lex Hortensia the difference between the two parliamentary sovereigns—the Populus and the Plebs—was even more marked; for the Patricians, excluded from the concilium, were still a considerable body, and the tribune had not yet become, like the magistrates with imperium, quite a servant of the Senate.[2] The Hortensian law had at the time a political significance which it afterwards lost; but it had a hidden import which was of vital consequence for the history of the state. By perpetuating the Plebs as a separate corporation it preserved the tribunate in all its primitive majesty, and thus maintained the power subsequently to be used as an instrument of senatorial and monarchical rule.
The tendencies of plebeian emancipation were almost all in favour of the upper classes; that it never was a democratic movement or one led by democratically-minded men is most strikingly evidenced by the utter indifference shown by the leaders to the economic evils under which the masses laboured, and which they used as instruments to further their ambition. Solon abolished slavery for debt at a single stroke; to the Roman it is a sacred thing, an expression of Romana fides; while the Greek [Greek: prostatês] struggled for others, the Roman patron fought for himself. But continued pressure caused some tentative efforts to be made in the latter half of the fourth century to mitigate the curse of debt. A lex Marcia of 352 B.C. gave the debtor the right of summary arrest (manus injectio) of the usurer, to recover the fourfold penalty for the illegal interest;[3] while in 326 an attempt was made to give the future masters of the world the mastery over their bodies. In 313 a lex Poetilia was passed forbidding the imprisonment of nexi who could swear
