The number of the treasurers or masters of the exchequer, whose election was indeed formerly made by the king or the curies, but afterwards assigned by Poplicola to the centuries, was raised from two to four, to be taken alike from patricians and plebeians. At first the patricians still hinder the carrying out of this clause; but at a later period the plebeians make good their right. This progress was not a mere point of honour, but it was a reality; it was closely connected with the dearest interests of the _Plebes_, as they now shared in the administration of the common exchequer, which was no more _Publicum_ but _Ærarium_. By this means, as we have already remarked, the senate was now opened to the plebeians also, and they could be degraded from it by the power of the censors only. A further advance to freedom was this, that about twenty years after the legislation of the decemvirs, the right of declaring war and peace passed from the curies to the centuries. That the curies originally had this right, we know from Dionysius; yet as the plebeians alone were bound to serve on foot, and the patricians withheld the booty from them, it was natural that the tribunes should have claimed for their order the right of deciding whether they would have war or not; and consequently the veto of the tribunes to a declaration of war is nothing else but a reservation of the rights of the _Plebes_. If the centuries had carried the resolution, the curies were of course obliged to confirm it; yet this was certainly not always the case, as the proposal originated with the senate, and it is not at all likely that the senate and the curies should not have agreed. The existence of plebeian senators is now as clear as daylight, and it is expressly stated that P. Licinius Calvus sat in the senate. Whenever therefore an interrex was to be elected, it was no longer the _decem primi_ who met together,--for, they had lost their importance by the admission of the plebeians,--but all the patricians in the whole of the senate. This is what is meant by _Patricii coeunt ad Interregem prodendum_, and it might have been based even on the laws of the Twelve Tables. One can quite understand that the ancients might have known the laws of the Twelve Tables by heart, and yet not have perceived, that something different was written in them from what was afterwards the rule. Thus then we have seen, how from the legislation of the decemvirs down to the conquest of the city by the Gauls, the development of free institutions at home steadily kept pace with the expansion of the state abroad; and hence it is manifest that the two were necessarily linked together.