Of the arguments in favor of Niebuhr’s hypothesis either added by Schwegler[190] or brought by him into greater prominence, one only demands attention. He reasons that if the plebs were in the curiate assembly, it would be impossible to explain the political advance made by the institution of the comitia centuriata; and the constitutional history of Rome would be reduced to an insoluble riddle. Here we have to deal with a subjective argument—the rejection of sources because they do not agree with a preconceived theory. Arguments of the kind, however, which may be easily invented for the support or overthrow of every imaginable proposition, carry little weight. Besides it is easy to show by analogies from the history of other peoples that the presence of the commons in the primitive assembly does not make the constitutional history of Rome a real enigma. In the primitive German assembly, for instance, were included all the warriors; and yet in the more developed German states were monarchies and aristocracies which gave the people little or no voice in the management of public affairs.[191] The Homeric Greek assembly included all freemen, who, however, had little to do with the government in that period, and still less under the aristocracy which followed.[192] In like manner, although the plebeians attended the comitia curiata and had a majority of votes in this assembly, they could not thereby control the government, for they absolutely lacked initiative.[193] The comitia centuriata, a timocratic institution, elevated the rich and degraded the poor. Here as elsewhere the poor lost by the substitution of aristocracy for kingship; but a real constitutional advance was made in the gradations of privilege, which were based on wealth and which reached like a ladder from the humblest member of the proletarian century to the patrician knight in the sex suffragia.[194] These gradations prepared the way for an ultimate equalization of rights. We conclude, then, that the presence of the commons in the primitive assembly is perfectly compatible with a rational view of constitutional development.