loss of its political privileges and of its exclusive estimation
in the community. The exclusion of the plebeians from all public
magistracies and public priesthoods--while they were admissible to
the position of officers and senators--and the maintenance, with
perverse obstinacy, of the legal impossibility of marriage between old
burgesses and plebeians, further impressed on the patriciate from the
outset the stamp of an exclusive and wrongly privileged aristocracy.

A second consequence of the new union of the burgesses must have been
a more definite regulation of the right of settlement, with reference
both to the Latin confederates and to other states. It became
necessary--not so much on account of the right of suffrage in the
centuries (which indeed belonged only to the freeholder) as on
account of the right of appeal, which was intended to be conceded
to the plebeian, but not to the foreigner dwelling for a time or
even permanently in Rome--to express more precisely the conditions
of the acquisition of plebeian rights, and to mark off the enlarged
burgess-body in its turn from those who were now the non-burgesses.
To thisepoch therefore we may trace back--in the views and feelings
of the people--both the invidiousness of the distinction between
patricians and plebeians, and the strict and haughty line of demarcation
between -cives Romani- and aliens. But the former civic distinction was
in its nature transient, while the latter political one was permanent;
and the sense of political unity and rising greatness, which was thus
implanted in the heart of the nation, was expansive enough first
to undermine and then to carry away with its mighty current those
paltry distinctions.

Law and Edict