This activity of the people in financial legislation is to be explained by the economic distress which lasted many years, and which the measures thus far mentioned failed to remedy. There can be no doubt that the general indebtedness and the resultant discontent of the masses, assigned by the annalists to the earliest years of the republic, belong in reality to the period now under consideration. The murmurings of the debtors culminated in 342 in a military mutiny, with which the masses of citizens seem to have been in full sympathy. The demands of the soldiers and civilians were met (1) by a law of the dictator Valerius, which, remedying other grievances of the soldiers, is said to have proclaimed an abolition of debts,[1815] (2) by the plebiscite of L. Genucius, tribune of the same year. The provisions of the latter were as follows: (1) it forbade the lending of money on interest; (2) it ordered that no one should fill the same office within a period of ten years, or two offices at the same time;(3) it allowed both consuls to be plebeian.[1816] Although Livy, failing to find the Genucian law in all his sources, hesitates to accept it as historical, there seems to be no cogent ground for disbelieving that such a statute was actually passed.[1817] The legal rate of interest had recently been lowered one-half; and the plebeians, not satisfied with the temporary relief afforded by the cancellation of debts, hoped for all time to free themselves from an intolerable affliction by one sweeping legislative act. This article of the plebiscite, however, probably remained from the beginning a dead letter. The second continued unenforced for many years,[1818] whereas the provision regarding two consuls had to wait more than a century for its first practical application.[1819] The patricians had often violated the Licinian-Sextian statute by placing two of their number together in the consulship. Perhaps the third article of the Genucian law was intended to make them respect the earlier statute by a threat to exclude them entirely from this office. If this was the object of Genucius, his means certainly proved effective.[1820] Three years later the dictator Publilius Philo passed through the centuriate assembly the statute (1) that plebi scita should be binding on all the quirites; (2) that before the voting began the patres should give their auctoritas to proposals brought before the comitia centuriata; (3) that one censor at least should be plebeian (339).[1821] All three articles were alike aimed against the political dominance of the patricians. The second freed centuriate legislation from their control;[1822] the third[1823] assured to the plebeians a just share in the function of determining the composition of the tribes, hence of the civil and political status of every Roman. It was not long afterward that the censors were to be given in addition the function of revising the list of senators.[1824]