ere attached to the tribunes as their servants and assistants,
primarily to effect arrest, on which account the same inviolable
character was assured to them also by the collective oath of the
plebeians. Moreover the aediles themselves had judicial powers like
the tribunes, but only for the minor causes that might be settled by
fines. If an appeal was lodged against the decision of tribune or
aedile, it was addressed not to the whole body of the burgesses, with
which the officials of the plebs were not entitled at all to transact
business, but to the whole body of the plebeians, which in this case
met by curies and finally decided by majority of votes.

This procedure certainly savoured of violence rather than of justice,
especially when it was adopted against a non-plebeian, as must in fact
have been ordinarily the case. It was not to be reconciled either
with the letter or the spirit of the constitution that a patrician
should be called to account by authorities who presided not over the
body of burgesses, but over an association formed within it, and that
he should be compelled to appeal, not to the burgesses, but to this
very association. This was originally without question Lynch justice;
but the self-help was doubtless carried into effect from early times
in form of law, and was after the legal recognition of the tribunate
of the plebs regarded as lawfully admissible.

In point of intention this new jurisdiction of the tribunes and the
aediles, and the appellate decision of the plebeian assembly therein
originating, were beyond doubt just as much bound to the laws as the
jurisdiction of the consuls and quaestors and the judgment of the
centuries on appeal; the legal conceptions of crime against the
community(5) and of offences against order(6) were transferred from
the community and its magistrates to the plebs and its champions.
But these conceptions were themselves so little fixed, and their
statutory definition was so difficult and indeed impossible, that
the administration of justice under these categories from its very
nature bore almost inevitably the stamp of arbitrariness. And now
when the very idea of right had become obscured amidst the struggles
of the orders, and when the legal party--leaders on both sides were
furnished with a co-ordinate jurisdiction, this jurisdiction must have
more and more approximated to a mere arbitrary police. It affected
in particular the magistrate. Hitherto the latte