most important right of the government
--the exclusive administration of the public property--struck at the
root of the power of the senate, but because the placing of the most
important business of this nature--the distribution of the public
domains--in the hands of the primary assemblies of the burgesses
necessarily dug the grave of the republic. To allow the primary
assembly to decree the transference of public property without limit
to its own pocket is not only wrong, but is the beginning of the end;
it demoralizes the best-disposed citizens, and gives to the proposer
a power incompatible with a free commonwealth. Salutary as was the
distribution of the public land, and doubly blameable as was the
senate accordingly for omitting to cut off this most dangerous of all
weapons of agitation by voluntarily distributing the occupied lands,
yet Gaius Flaminius, when he came to the burgesses in 522 with the
proposal to distribute the domains of Picenum, undoubtedly injured the
commonwealth more by the means than he benefited it by the end.
Spurius Cassius had doubtless two hundred and fifty years earlier
proposed the same thing;(70) but the two measures, closely as they
coincided in the letter, were yet wholly different, inasmuch as
Cassius submitted a matter affecting the community to that community
while it was in vigour and self-governing, whereas Flaminius submitted
a question of state to the primary assembly of a great empire.

Nullity of the Comitia

Not the party of the government only, but the party of reform also,
very properly regarded the military, executive, and financial
government as the legitimate domain of the senate, and carefully
abstained from making full use of, to say nothing of augmenting, the
formal power vested in primary assemblies that were inwardly doomed to
inevitable dissolution. Never even in the most limited monarchy was a
part so completely null assigned to the monarch as was allotted to the
sovereign Roman people: this was no doubt in more than one respect to
be regretted, but it was, owing to the existing state of the comitial
machine, even in the view of the friends of reform a matter of
necessity. For this reason Cato and those who shared his views never
submitted to the burgesses a question, which trenched on government
strictly so called; and never, directly or indirectly, by decree of
the burgesses extorted from the senate the political or financial
measures which they wished,