The Hortensian enactment which raised the plebiscite to an equality with the lex and gave the tribunician initiative full constitutional freedom[2003] seems to have been especially calculated to prepare for a splendid outburst of legislative energy. No such result, however, was actually reached. Circumstances prove the leaders of the plebs to have been well satisfied with the political gains thus far made as regards (1) their place in the senate assured them by the Ovinian statute,[2004] (2) their right to the magistracies, confirmed by various laws, (3) the powers of the tribunate and its relation to the senate established by the Hortensian statute. Content with their position as a branch of the widened nobility, inferior neither politically nor socially to the patrician branch, and happy in the enjoyment of authority, they were now as much inclined as the patricians to discourage and to resist further aggression on the part of the plain citizens. Their control of the initiative in legislation was the chief means of forwarding this policy. Their respect for the senate, in which they were now rapidly becoming the dominant party, was such that they were willing to forego the recently acquired privilege of bringing their rogations before the people without the senatorial sanction. But in case a tribune was so bold and so out of harmony with his political peers as to offer an unsanctioned bill, they could count on the intercession of one of his colleagues; if matters came to an extremity, the senate could annul the act after its adoption by declaring it illegal or contrary to the auspices.[2005] Evidently the plebeian nobles were aware, too, that with the increase in the number of citizens and with their dispersion over Italy the assembly had ceased to represent the citizen body, and was failing in ability to grapple with the new and increasingly complex problems of administration created by the widening of the Roman domain.[2006] Under these new conditions the assemblies continued, it is true, to elect their annual magistrates and to receive appeals from the judicial decisions of the latter, more rarely to declare war or to ratify a treaty. Occasionally they passed a law to increase the number of magistrates or to regulate elections; but for the fifty-five years following the Hortensian legislation, 287-232, there is no record of the enactment of a distinctly administrative law. The silence of history on this point is due not so much to the exceptionally scant sources[2007] as to a lack of comitial activity.