The prohibition would seem to have arisen from long-continued custom rather than from law, and to have been of a character not unsimilar to the so-called "conventions of the English Constitution," or to the rule in this country that no man shall be elected for a third term as President. If a law declaring a tribune to be ineligible for reëlection was ever enacted in Rome (and with the absence of a full list of Roman laws this is a point on which absolute certainty is impossible) it was, in all probability, of a directory rather than a mandatory character. Such was the character of all Roman laws relative to the qualification of officers. Thus, the Roman laws provided a regular order in which the principal offices at Rome should be held, and prohibited any person holding any office until he had held all those named before it on the list, and until he had reached a certain specified age. This law, while in the main followed, was frequently disregarded. The violations were in the main chargeable to the very class at Rome that was most bitter in the denunciation of Tiberius Gracchus for offering himself as a candidate for reëlection as tribune. Under the existing political conditions at Rome no great blame could be attached to an occasional disregard either of the law regulating the qualifications for office or the law, or custom, relative to the reëlection of a tribune. It is only on this one occasion in Roman history that the violation of either of these laws was denounced as an attack on the Roman constitution. Even in the exciting days preceding the passage of the Licinian Laws the tribunes Licinius and Sextius were reëlected year after year, without the legality of their election being questioned. Only ten years after the death of Tiberius Gracchus the reëlection to the office of tribune of his brother, Gaius Gracchus, was permitted. It is a striking comment upon the fairness of some of the historians who attack Tiberius Gracchus for his alleged violation of the law that they are able to find excuses for the action of that branch of the senatorial party whose members were so unwilling to surrender to the state their illegal profits that they resorted to force to break up a meeting of the comitia tributa and to murder Gracchus and three hundred of his adherents.