The senate now became a number of men chosen by the people, inasmuch as the magistrates were granted the privilege of voting in the senate, and the right of being elected into it on the publication of the new list; a right which also extended to the quæstors. Now, when in the year 346 the quæstorship was thrown open to both orders, I see in this the first occasion on which plebeians were admitted into the senate; and as from henceforth eight quæstors were appointed every year, the arbitrary sway of the censors must have been entirely put an end to. They might indeed exclude the plebeians; but as the senate consisted of no more than three hundred, and the censors, at the end of every _lustrum_, always saw forty men before them who had a claim to be elected into the senate, it is manifest that the senate could soon have become rather a plebeian than a patrician assembly. The power of the censors therefore declined in the course of time, like that of all the magistrates, with the exception of the tribunes: at first, only a censor could check the resolutions of his colleague; afterwards, the tribunes also took upon themselves to interfere with the determinations of the censors. It was formerly thought impossible that the censors should have had such a power as was granted them by the Lex Ovinia, or it was deemed detestable; yet they really had in the beginning an immense discretionary power. But, as in after times it was no more the two orders exclusively, but government and people who stood opposed against each other, the people set limits to the government, and the censors were also deprived of their arbitrary sway. To the patricians the censorial power had no reference; nor, with the then existing notions of the auspices, could any body become a patrician by adoption, though indeed this was done in after times.