t was thoroughly
necessary to leave to the censors absolute control over the personal
composition of the senate and the equites; for the right of exclusion
could not well be separated from the right of summoning, and it was
indispensable to retain such a right, not so much for the purpose of
removing from the senate capable men of the opposition--a course which
the smooth-going government of that age cautiously avoided--as for the
purpose of preserving around the aristocracy that moral halo, without
which it must have speedily become a prey to the opposition. The
right of ejection was retained; but what they chiefly needed was the
glitter of the naked blade--the edge of it, which they feared, they
took care to blunt. Besides the check involved in the nature of the
office--under which the lists of the members of the aristocratic
corporations were liable to revision only at intervals of five years
--and besides the limitations resulting from the right of veto vested
in the colleague and the right of cancelling vested in the successor,
there was added a farther check which exercised a very sensible
influence; a usage equivalent to law made it the duty of the censor
not to erase from the list any senator or knight without specifying in
writing the grounds for his decision, or, in other words, adopting, as
a rule, a quasi-judicial procedure.

Remodelling of the Constitution According to the Views of the Nobility
Inadequate Number of Magistrates

In this political position--mainly based on the senate, the equites,
and the censorship--the nobility not only usurped in substance the
government, but also remodelled the constitution according to their
own views. It was part of their policy, with a view to keep up the
appreciation of the public magistracies, to add to the number of these
as little as possible, and to keep it far below what was required by
the extension of territory and the increase of business. Only the
most urgent exigencies were barely met by the division of the judicial
functions hitherto discharged by a single praetor between two judges
--one of whom tried the lawsuits between Roman burgesses, and the
other those that arose between non-burgesses or between burgess and
non-burgess--in 511, and by the nomination of four auxiliary consuls
for the four transmarine provinces of Sicily (527), Sardinia including
Corsica (527), and Hither and Further Spain (557). The far too
summary mode of initialing processes