With respect to power the tribunate has, from its origin, a double character. It possesses a negative control of the whole people (generally in the person of its magistrate) exercised in defence of the Plebs, and a positive authority within the plebeian community. The first power asserts itself in the right of veto, the second is shown in the power of eliciting resolutions (_scita plebei_ or _plebiscita_) from the plebeian _concilium_. The first power, that of offering assistance (_auxilium_) to any Plebeian[362] who feels himself aggrieved by the decree of the magistrate, and suspending this decree by the exercise of the “veto,” was the _raison d’être_ of the tribunate. The tribune was created to meet the consular imperium (_contra consulare imperium_),[363] and the fact that he could only exercise this power in person imposed on him certain obligations. The tribune might not stay a night without the walls, and the doors of his house were open day and night.[364] It was doubtless through the insufficiency of these presidents of the Plebs to cope with the demands for their assistance that their number was raised first to four (471 B.C.), and before the year 449 B.C. to ten[365]—changes which were ratified by the centuries and the Senate. But a negative control over the magistrates of the state must be wholly ineffective unless there be some means of enforcing this control. Had the tribunes possessed no coercive power, the consul, in carrying out the law of debt or in summoning Plebeians for the levy, would simply have set their veto aside. We should have expected that such breaches of the law would have been guarded against by judicial prosecution before the courts of the community. But this was not consistent with the Roman idea of magistracy. Each magistrate had, to a greater or less degree, the power of enforcing his own decrees (_coercitio_), limited only by the right of appeal or the veto of his colleague; and this power could not be denied to the tribune. A logical consequence of his right of veto was that he could exercise this _coercitio_ against the consuls themselves; the sanctity of his person (guaranteed by the Plebs and accepted by the Populus) rendered resistance hopeless; and all the weapons of the _coercitio_—arrest, imprisonment, fines, stripes, and death—were at the disposal of the champion of the Plebs.