The right of the people both in the centuries and in the tribes to legislate on finance had before 339 been well established by precedent. Economic as well as social in character was the lex Poetelia, which prohibited loans on the security of the person,[1899] and which was proposed to the tribes, or possibly to the centuries, by C. Poetelius Libo as consul in 326 or as dictator in 313.[1900] It abolished contractual but not judicial servitude, though it probably mitigated the latter.[1901] Politically more significant than this individual act was the long-continued popular effort to gain control of the disposal of the public land. It was to the detriment of the senatorial prerogative that the tribunes of the plebs took up the agrarian question from the time of Sp. Cassius,[1902] and continued almost unceasingly to agitate for the limitation of the use of public land by the rich and the division of the surplus among the poor, till they succeeded in embodying their ideas in the Licinian-Sextian law on these subjects. Equally to the province of the senate belonged the planting of colonies[1903] both from the military and from the financial point of view. Here, too, the tribunes in the economic interest of their constituents began early to agitate for a share in the administration.[1904] It was not till 296 that they met with any success in this direction, and then at the will of the senate, which charged the tribunes with the business of introducing a plebiscite for ordering the praetor to appoint triumviri for conducting colonies to certain specified places.[1905] This was the modest outcome of centuries of agrarian and colonial agitation on the part of the tribunes.