In 357 tribal comitia under patrician chairmanship passed a law for placing a tax of five per cent on manumissions of slaves. The circumstances attending this meeting were peculiar; the consul Cn. Manlius summoned to it the soldiers of his army in the camp at Sutrium.[1807] It must have been composed, therefore, of a small minority of the citizens, lacking not only those who were too old for service, but doubtless a majority of the men of military age. Difficulties regarding the auspices, too, and other formalities might have arisen; and yet in spite of the fact that the enactment of the law was an intrusion within the administrative domain of the senate, the patres gave their sanction;[1808] and the legality of the measure was never called in question.[1809] In contrast with the general prevalence of free labor in early Rome, the number of slaves since the conquest of Veii had become considerable; and wealthy individuals were evidently beginning the practice of building up a political following through the clientage of their freedmen, to the disadvantage of the older plebs. The majority of the patricians must have been in sympathy with the effort of their consul to check this new development, although they could not approve the peculiar means by which the law was passed. Nor could the tribunes of the plebs allow legislation to be thus removed beyond the sphere of their control. The repetition of the procedure was immediately forbidden accordingly by a plebiscite which threatened with the death penalty any magistrate who held comitia away from the city.[1810] In the same year the people took a further step in the administration of finance by enacting the Duillian-Menenian plebiscite for establishing the rate of interest at ten per cent[1811]—thereby confirming a law of the Twelve Tables[1812]—and five years later the consular law of P. Valerius Publicola and C. Marcius Rutilus for the institution of a bank under the direction of five commissioners to assist debtors in meeting their obligations (352).[1813] The latter was followed in 347 by a plebiscite which reduced the maximal rate of interest to five per cent and provided for the payment of the principal in four equal annual instalments.[1814]