A lasting result was the institution of the office of the _Tribuni Plebis_. These tribunes were no innovation in themselves. At the restoration of the tribunate after the second secession, the commonalty had twenty chiefs, viz. one for each tribe; among these two are invested with the power. The tribes in fact make up two decuries, and for each of these there is a chief; just as in the senate there were ten decuries, each of which had a _primus_, all of whom together constituted the board of the _decem primi_. Symmetrical arrangements every where recur in the old institutions, wherefore we may by induction from a known quantity arrive at the unknown. Thus, when we read that the first tribunes had been two, who made choice of three more to join them; it is certain that those two were the foremen of the existing twenty or twenty-one tribunes, who in a new state of things merely rose to a higher sphere of official functions. The difference without doubt was this, that the old tribunes were elected by the several tribes (as the phylarchs in the Greek states were by each phyle); the new ones, on the contrary, by the whole commonalty. C. Licinius and L. Albinius are mentioned as the two first tribunes; Sicinius, the general of the _Plebes_ at the secession, is one of the three who were chosen in addition. The plebeians were not able to recover their good right which the Servian constitution had given them; they had to be content with defending themselves against oppression. Their magistracy was therefore _auxilii ferendi gratia_; the tribunes by an oath were declared inviolable (_corpora sacrosancta_), so that they might step in between the holders of power and those who were aggrieved and protect the latter. Before that, owing to the spirit of caste and the pride of office among the patricians, the tribune who impeached a consul, would have in vain incurred the peril of the prosecution, as there was another consul with equal pretensions, and all the patricians sided with him;--indeed the consul would have caused the tribune who appealed against him to the commonalty, to be arrested and chastised. Whoever henceforth laid hand on a tribune, was proscribed as an outlaw; and if the consul did not put the outlawry in force against him, the tribune might after the expiration of his period of office, summon him before the tribunal of the curies, or even perhaps of the tribes. The tribunes were perhaps scarcely a magistracy in the commonalty, certainly not in the state. Justus Lipsius, an ingenious and very learned man, with whom as a philologist I am not worthy to be compared, has by his authority, great as he is as a grammarian, done much mischief with regard to Roman antiquities. Whenever a magistracy, or a military arrangement is mentioned, he, and all those who follow in his wake, never distinguish between the different ages. A tribune at the end of the third century is by no means like a tribune of Cicero’s time. It is just the same in Roman