Two other laws aimed at giving a legal existence to the plebeian community. One gave a legal sanction to the _sacrosanctitas_ of the plebeian magistrates by enacting that any one who injured them should be _sacer_ to the whole community.[420] Another gave a more binding character to the formal resolutions passed at the _concilium_ of the Plebs. Its import is obscure, but there can be no doubt that it marks an important stage in the validity of _plebiscita_. We are told that it was meant to settle the controverted question whether resolutions of the Plebs were binding on Patricians;[421] and that it did this by enacting that “whatsoever the Plebs commanded by its tribes should bind the people (_ut, quod tributim plebes jussisset, populum teneret_).” It is possible that our authority has misunderstood the purport of this law, but hardly likely that the misconception is so great as that imagined by some modern theorists. It is certain that there is no implication that _plebiscita_ had from this time the force of _leges_; it was agreed that the resolutions of the Plebs did not gain the force of Acts of Parliament until more than 160 years later. Recent attempts to interpret the Valerio-Horatian law have been based on the supposition that it was concerned with some mode in which a _plebiscitum_ might become a _lex_, that it facilitated the transformation of a resolution of the Plebs into a binding law of the Populus, through an intermediary channel, consuls or Senate.[422] The wording of the law (hardly so remote from its original as has been supposed) scarcely gives a warrant for this view; it speaks only of giving a “binding character” to such resolutions. It must be remembered that at this time the plebeian community was not really bound by the resolutions of its own _concilium_, for this was not a legally recognised corporation. The Valerio-Horatian law may have made it such, a corporate body passing resolutions binding on all its members. But a law which is valid for a corporation is valid for those outside the corporation. The ordinances, it is true, which have this binding force must refer immediately only to the affairs of the community which dictates them. This was the case with _plebiscita_ now. All self-regarding ordinances of the Plebs bound the Plebeians in the first degree, the Patricians, if it infringed existing rights, in the second degree. All _plebiscita_ of a wider scope must still have been mere petitions to the consuls.[423] We can hardly conceive that the law discriminated accurately between what was possible to the Plebs and what was not; it was sufficient to recognise the already established maxim that corporations could frame their own rules _dum ne quid ex publica lege corrumpant_.[424] From this time onwards, down to 287, whenever we find _plebiscita_ affecting matters of national interest or creating changes in the constitution,[425] we must assume that they were brought