was, the fact is easily accounted for that few only read them; yet the majority did not know in the least what was spoken of, and thus republican form in such transactions is necessarily a mere phantom. Dionysius has this very happy expression, that the Romans had aimed at ἰσονομία, and that they had attained to ἰσηγορία.[101] From an occasional remark of Tacitus we know, that the ancient laws were for the most part ascribed to kings, Romulus, Numa, Tullus, and Ancus. This shows, that each of the three old tribes and the _Plebes_ had their own peculiar law which was derived from their first founders. These tribes and the _Plebes_, which had originally been separate civic communities, had retained their old statutes when they united into one state. I think I have been told of more than a hundred sets of statutes, all of which, before the revolution, were in force in the States of the Church. Many a village in Italy which does not number a hundred hearths, has its own common law: Abbate Morelli has collected three hundred different varieties of statutes in Italy. This is likewise the case in many districts of Germany; yet there are also very large tracts of country there, in which one and the same law of the land prevails. It cannot even be stated with certainty whether the whole of the _Plebes_ had the same law; whether in places like Medullia and Politorium a different system was not in vogue. This seems indeed to be contradicted by the fact that Servius Tullius swept away every difference among the plebeians; but on the other hand it seems confirmed by the circumstance that there were towns like Cameria and others, which existed as _Coloniæ Romanæ_, and formed separate communities. The ancients had a tradition according to which the clause in the Twelve Tables, that the _Fortes_ and the _Sanates_ were to have equal rights, applied to certain places, as for instance, to Tibur. On the establishment of such an equality, the chiefs of the _Plebes_ might very well insist, as the disadvantages of this difference of usages must have been great enough to have been very severely felt. Abolition of all that constituted a glaring and oppressive inequality was the object of this reform, and this the tribunes might certainly demand. Still there existed no _connubium_ between patricians and plebeians; the child took its rank from the parent of the worse blood (_deteriorem partem sequi_). Thus in the Italian cities, Lombards, Franks, Romans, and others, lived together for centuries under their own peculiar laws; but this, by its very inconvenience, afterwards gave rise to the statute law with equal rights.