The right of the people to elect their magistrates, with the exception of the dictator and the master of horse, existed from the beginning of the republic. Their right also to create new offices began with the institution of the consulship, and was frequently exercised during the period treated in this chapter. In the age which begins with the Valerian-Horatian legislation we find the people regulating by law the qualifications and conduct of candidates as well as the powers and functions of the magistrates themselves. They had the same right to deal with the organization and competence of the assemblies. From 358 to 287 they rapidly extended their legislative power, by precedent rather than by statute, over the whole field of the constitution and over the administration in all its departments; they ventured even to regulate the senate and to interfere with the imperium. Controlled originally by the senate, in the end they won their freedom from that body, whereas the initiative in every act always remained with the presiding magistrate. Meantime they had acquired supreme judicial power. In constitutional theory they were at last sovereign. The senate and the magistrates, so this theory asserted, still retained large administrative powers for the sole reason that the assemblies, unable to manage the current details of public business, were content with occasional participation and regulation. Most of these gains had been made by the tribes under the presidency of tribunes or of patrician magistrates, usually praetors. In legislation the comitia tributa had rendered the centuriate assembly dispensable excepting in declarations of offensive war and in the confirmation of censorial elections. The question whether the people in their centuries and tribes were to realize their sovereignty in actual public life was left to the following period. The literature on this subject is included in the bibliography for the preceding chapter. CHAPTER XIV THE JUDICIAL FUNCTIONS OF THE COMITIA TRIBUTA FROM 287 TO THE END OF THE REPUBLIC I. _Tribunician Jurisdiction_ Whereas the sources assume that the tribunes of the plebs as early at least as the decemviral legislation had cognizance of both finable and capital cases,[1925] an examination of the recorded trials leads to the conclusion that they made little use of this power till the period between the legislation of Publilius Philo (339) and that of Hortensius (287).[1926] Whether their activity after 339 was due to the Publilian enactment of that year[1927] or merely to the gradual evolution of popular rights cannot be determined. However that may be, it was not till after the Hortensian legislation that we find the tribunician jurisdiction at its highest point of development and free from every restriction.[1928]