Afterwards there appear for once three military tribunes instead of the consuls. Dionysius says that it had been resolved to satisfy the _Plebes_ by the institution of military tribunes, three of whom were to be patricians and three plebeians. But there were only three, one of whom was a plebeian. Livy foolishly takes them all for patricians; he thinks that the plebeians had wanted indeed to possess the right, yet that afterwards they had looked upon themselves as unworthy of exercising it, and had elected patricians only. He speaks of the plebeians as if they had been unutterably stupid. This is the confused notion of a man who with all his genius was, after all, no more than a rhetorician. What is most likely, is that it was agreed upon to drop the name of consul altogether, as the two orders were indeed no longer distinct, and to leave the elections free and open to both parties; but that in the meanwhile all sorts of artifices were nevertheless employed to turn the scale in favour of the patricians. In the earlier times, for instance, the clients of the patricians were not in the tribes; like the patricians, they had to withdraw when the voting began; and whoever was not in the tribes, was either not in the centuries at all, or voted in them only with the craftsmen and the _capite censi_. Yet from henceforth every mention of cases in which _Plebes_ and clients were opposed, entirely ceases; and this ought to lead us to observe how trustworthy our accounts are. Could a forger of a later age have so accurately discriminated between the positions as implied by the law? A fabulist is always an unlearned man, and even a learned one would have made here some mistake. The clients now appear in the tribes, and therefore in the centuries likewise, as is expressly mentioned, and as we may also partly see from the circumstances themselves. The discussions of the Plebes now take quite a different character; they lose all their violence, the struggle of two hostile masses against each other, is at once entirely at an end. The checks which the plebeians meet with in the elections, &c., arise no more from any resistance from without, but they are from within the body itself. Whilst formerly the boards of the tribunes showed themselves unanimous, they are now divided; some of the members are even in the interest of the senate, and only single tribunes yet make such motions as those which formerly proceeded from the whole college. These are proofs of the fusion of the orders having been completed.