There was to be a long and bitter contest before the plebeians forced their way into the central patrician stronghold of the _imperium_, but even this was accomplished without civil war or bloodshed. We hear of a series of evasive manœuvres by the patricians, who naturally believed that all would go wrong if the duty of keeping “the peace of the gods” were committed to men whom the gods could not be supposed to take count of. But these patrician consuls and senators were responsible for the State’s existence, and it could not exist without the plebeians; the two classes were authorised by law to intermarry, which (strange to say) had been unlawful hitherto, and then the old class-feeling and prejudice, far exceeding in force any such feeling known to us now, gradually subsided. By the middle of the fourth century B.C., not only could a plebeian be consul, but one of the two consuls _must_ be a plebeian. And before that century was over the old patrician nobility was beginning to disappear, giving way to a new one based on the leading idea of _good service done for the State_. If a man had held the consulship, no matter whether he were patrician or plebeian, he became _nobilis_—_i.e._ distinguished—and so, too, did his family. The great Roman aristocracy of later times consisted of the descendants of men who had thus become distinguished. I will conclude this chapter with a few words about one remarkable institution which well illustrates the Roman instinct for duty and discipline. It was in this period, 443 B.C., according to the traditional date, that a new magistracy was established, intended at first merely to relieve the consuls of difficult duties for which in that warlike age they had no sufficient leisure, but destined eventually to become even a higher object of ambition than the consulship itself. The Roman love of order made it necessary to be sure that every citizen was justly and legally a citizen, that he fulfilled his duties in the army, and paid his taxes according to a right estimate of his property. Every four or five years an inquiry had to be made with this object in view, and two censors, holding office for a year and a half, were now elected to undertake it. These censors, though they had no _imperium_, were irresponsible; their decisions were final, and they could not be called to account for any official act. They were almost always—in later times invariably—reverend seniors who had held the consulship, men in whose justice and wisdom the people could put implicit confidence. And such confidence was needed; for their power of examination easily became extended from details of registration to the personal conduct of the citizen in almost every relation of life. All heads of families might be questioned about their performance of family duties, and any shameful cruelty to a slave, or injustice to a client, or neglect of children, might be punished by removal from the list of tribesmen; and this meant