The patricians expected to find a further safeguard in the tribunician veto, which could be directed against a colleague.[1688] From the fact, however, that the tribunes continued to resort to the clumsy method of obstructing the levy, and afterward also of impeding the collection of the tributum,[1689] we must infer that as yet their intercession did not prevail against a patrician magistrate.[1690] Various popular seditions, too, are mentioned for the same period (449-287).[1691] That one which led to the Hortensian legislation is historical, and it is hardly possible that all the others are fictions. Another conservative check was the application of oblative auspices to the plebeian assembly.[1692] Livy[1693] reports that in 293 the tribunes resigned because of a faulty election, held probably in violation of oblativa. In general, however, the plebeian gathering was relatively free from religious control till after the enactment of the Aelian and Fufian laws (about 150).[1694] It had the advantage of the comitia centuriata (1) in freedom from the impetrative auspices, (2) in freedom from the patrum auctoritas, (3) in mobility. Immediately after the adoption of the Valerian-Horatian statute it must have become evident that the tribunician assembly, through the character of its presidency, its composition, and its democratic spirit, was to outstrip the centuriate gathering in energy and aggressiveness, and to be in a word the chief factor of progress in legislation. No enactment affecting the jurisdiction of tribunes is referred to Valerius and Horatius by the ancient writers; and yet the arrangement by which they thereafter brought their capital actions before the centuries could not have been made without the consent of the government. If, on the other hand, the tribunes now possessed an unconditioned power to subject patricians, whether magistrates or private citizens, to capital prosecutions, they would have found it so effective a means of political warfare as no longer to need obstruction and sedition in their struggle for plebeian rights. In capital cases the permission of a higher magistrate, ordinarily after 367 the praetor, was required; and before the enactment of the Hortensian statute, we may well believe, the tribunes had no means of forcing this permission. Some similar restriction must have been placed on their liberty to bring finable actions. The comitia tributa under tribunician presidency had at length become an effective constitutional factor in legislation and in jurisdiction. But its action in the former sphere was dependent upon the favor of the senate, in the latter on that of a patrician magistrate. The range, too, of its legislation was restricted by the wide administrative powers of the senate. We shall find it in the following period winning freedom and enlarging the field of its activity. The following literature is for the whole period from 449 to 287.