claims of this class――the city rabble, as both patricians and plebeians called it――were supported by a daring and able patrician, Appius Claudius, who, during his censorship, admitted ærarians into all the tribes indiscriminately. Eventually, however, a compromise was effected: the ærarians were enrolled in the four city tribes, thus obtaining some influence, but not so much as Appius seemed to destine for them. It appears to have been at some period also during the Samnite wars that a modification took place in the constitution of the comitia centuriata, the leading feature of which seems to have been a blending of the tribes with the centuries, so as to accommodate the assembly to the altered state of society and the altered scale of wealth. Of the precise nature of this change, however, as of the precise time at which it occurred, we are ignorant. It may be considered, nevertheless, to have perfected the Roman constitution, and to have adapted it for the function of maintaining the government of the entire peninsula. Italy, once fairly subjugated and laid out by the Romans (B. C. 266), its population may be considered as having been distributed into three political divisions――the _Populus Romanus_, or citizens of Rome, properly so called; the _Socii_, or inhabitants of the allied and dependent Italian states; and the _Nomen Latinum_, or citizens of the ‘Latin name.’ The first of these, the Populus Romanus, included the whole body of the free inhabitants of the thirty-three tribes or parishes north and south of the Tiber, which constituted the Roman territory strictly so called, together with a considerable number of persons scattered over the other parts of Italy, who were also accounted citizens, either because they were colonists of Roman descent, or because the title had been conferred on them as an honorary distinction. The total number of adult Roman citizens towards the close of the fifth century was under 300,000――a small proportion, evidently, of the vast Italian mass, which consisted, including the slaves, of about 5,000,000. Nor were all these equal in point of civil rights, many of them having the _franchise_, as it was called, or legal rights of citizens, without the _suffrage_, or political rights. The citizens with suffrage, those who voted on public questions――the real governing power, therefore, by whose impulses all Italy, with its millions of inhabitants, was swayed, as the body is moved by the beats of the heart――were a mere handful of men, such as might be assembled with ease in any public park or square.