or to hinder it.

The Magistrates. Partition and Weakening of the Consular Powers

As regards the power of the magistrates, its diminution, although not
the direct design of the struggles between the old and new burgesses,
was doubtless one of their most important results. At the beginning
of the struggle between the orders or, in other words, of the strife
for the possession of the consular power, the consulate was still
the one and indivisible, essentially regal, magistracy; and the
consul, like the king in former times, still had the appointment
of all subordinate functionaries left to his own free choice.
At the termination of that contest its most important functions
--jurisdiction, street-police, election of senators and equites,
the census and financial administration --were separated from the
consulship and transferred to magistrates, who like the consul
were nominated by the community and occupied a position far more
co-ordinate than subordinate. The consulate, formerly the single
ordinary magistracy of the state, was now no longer even absolutely
the first. In the new arrangement as to the ranking and usual order
of succession of the public offices the consulate stood indeed above
the praetorship, aedileship, and quaestorship, but beneath the
censorship, which--in addition to the most important financial duties
--was charged with the adjustment of the rolls of burgesses, equites,
and senators, and thereby wielded a wholly arbitrary moral control
over the entire community and every individual burgess, the humblest
as well as the most prominent. The conception of limited magisterial
power or special function, which seemed to the original Roman state-law
irreconcilable with the conception of supreme office, gradually
gained a footing and mutilated and destroyed the earlier idea of the