business, the initial steps in civil processes, and the command in
war. Especially important in its consequences was the change in
virtue of which neither the consul, nor even the otherwise absolute
dictator, was permitted to touch the public treasure except with the
consent and by the will of the senate. The senate made it obligatory
on the consuls to commit the administration of the public chest, which
the king had managed or might at any rate have managed himself, to two
standing subordinate magistrates, who were nominated no doubt by the
consuls and had to obey them, but were, as may easily be conceived,
much more dependent than the consuls themselves on the senate.(16)
It thus drew into its own hands the management of finance; and this
right of sanctioning the expenditure of money on the part of the
Roman senate may be placed on a parallel in its effects with the
right of sanctioning taxation in the constitutional monarchies
of the present day.

The consequences followed as a matter of course. The first and
most essential condition of all aristocratic government is, that
the plenary power of the state be vested not in an individual but
in a corporation. Now a preponderantly aristocratic corporation,
the senate, had appropriated to itself the government, and at the
same time the executive power not only remained in the hands of the
nobility, but was also entirely subject to the governing corporation.
It is true that a considerable number of men not belonging to the
nobility sat in the senate; but as they were incapable of holding
magistracies or even of taking part in the debates, and thus were
excluded from all practical share in the government, they necessarily
played a subordinate part in the senate, and were moreover kept in
pecuniary dependence on the corporation through the economically
important privilege of using the public pasture. The gradually