A remarkable change which dates from this time, is the repeal of the prohibition of intermarriage between patricians and plebeians. This prohibition, as we know, had been sanctioned by usage since the very earliest times, and had been first made an enactment in the twelve tables only; such a custom generally first becomes galling by being received among the written laws; and thus the storm was raised from which the _plebiscitum Canuleium_ sprang. This is usually considered as a great victory of the plebeians: the patricians, so it is said, at last yielded it in compensation for other rights which they reserved to themselves; Livy looks upon it as a degradation of the ruling order. If we take the matter as it really was, it is evident that the existence of such a prohibition did harm to no one more than to the patricians themselves. Mixed marriages from both orders must surely have been common at all times, and they were binding in conscience; yet the son of a patrician-plebeian marriage never had any gentilician rights, and was counted among the plebeians; the consequence of which was that the patricians were fast dwindling away. Wherever the nobles are limited to marriages within their own class, their order becomes quite powerless in the course of time. Rehberg mentions, that of the members of the States of the duchy of Bremen, in whose case sixteen quarters were required, one-third had become extinct within fifty years. If the plebeians had meant mischief against the patricians, they ought to have insisted with all their might upon the prohibition of intermarriage being kept up: but for the Canuleian law, the patricians would have lost their position in the state a hundred years sooner. We do not know, whether the thing was granted as a favour to the patricians or the plebeians; this is one of those cases in which no probable hypothesis can be formed; even absurdity is sometimes quite possible.