"When the Iroquois confederacy was formed, or soon after that event, two permanent war-chiefships were created and named.... As general commanders they had charge of the military affairs of the confederacy, and the command of its joint forces when united in a general expedition.... The creation of two principal war-chiefs instead of one, and with equal power, argues a subtle and calculating policy to prevent the domination of a single man even in their military affairs. They did without experience precisely as the Romans did in creating two consuls instead of one, after they had abolished the office of _rex_. Two consuls would balance the military power between them, and prevent either from becoming supreme. Among the Iroquois this office never became influential."[64] But Calhoun lays much more stress upon another example,--that of the protection which the Roman plebeians got in tribunes elected from their own order alone, which tribunes could veto any act of the lawmaking organs, all of which were then actually in the hands of their oppressors, that is, the order of patricians; the result being that in course of time the plebeians achieved equality.[65] Of course the inevitable could not be put off. And yet ought we not to admire the inventive genius of the statesman who of all proposed the remedy that promised the best? And ought we not also to cherish in affectionate memory this last and high effort of Calhoun to avert a dreadful brothers' war at hand, the end and consequences of which nobody could then forecast? The situation of Rome granting tribunes to the plebs was widely different from ours. That was a case of giving a veto to one class only, and to a class which belonged to the entire body politic. Calhoun proposed not a single veto, but two; neither one to be given such a class as we have just mentioned, but a veto to each one of two geographical divisions, in one of which there was a developed, and in the other a nascent and almost complete, nationality, these two nationalities already closed with each other in a life and death grapple. His hope must have been to confine the combatants to an arena which could be effectually policed by the civil power, and in which all fighting except with buttoned foils be prevented. We may be almost sure that his heart broke when that presentiment which often comes to the dying as clear as sunlight revealed the bloody war that was quickening its approach.