Caere and southward to Cumae; within this district there were only a few cities not included in it, such as Tibur, Praeneste, Signia, Norba, and Ferentinum.  To this fell to be added the maritime colonies on the coasts of Italy which uniformly possessed the full Roman franchise, the Picenian and Trans-Apennine colonies of the most recent times, to which the franchise must have been conceded,(38) and a very considerable number of Roman burgesses, who, without forming separate communities in a strict sense, were scattered throughout Italy in market-villages and hamlets (-fora et conciliabula-).  To some extent the unwieldiness of a civic community so constituted was remedied, for the purposes of justice(39) and of administration, by the deputy judges previously mentioned;(40) and already perhaps the maritime(41) and the new Picenian and Trans-Apennine colonies exhibited at least the first lineaments of the system under which afterwards smaller urban communities were organized within the great city-commonwealth of Rome.  But in all political questions the primary assembly in the Roman Forum remained alone entitled to act; and it is obvious at a glance, that this assembly was no longer, in its composition or in its collective action, what it had been when all the persons entitled to vote could exercise their privilege as citizens by leaving their farms in the morning and returning home the same evening.  Moreover the government—­whether from want of judgment, from negligence, or from any evil design, we cannot tell—­no longer as formerly enrolled the communities admitted to the franchise after 513 in newly instituted election-districts, but included them along with others in the old; so that gradually each tribe came to be composed of different townships scattered over the whole Roman territory.  Election-districts such as these, containing on an average 8000—­the urban naturally having more, the rural fewer —­persons entitled to vote, without local connection or inward unity, no longer admitted of any definite leading or of any satisfactory previous deliberation; disadvantages which must have been the more felt, since the voting itself was not preceded by any free debate.  Moreover, while the burgesses had quite sufficient capacity to discern their communal interests, it was foolish and utterly ridiculous to leave the decision of the highest and most difficult questions which the power that ruled the world had to solve to a well-disposed but fortuitous concourse of Italian farmers, and to allow the nomination of generals and the conclusion of treaties of state to be finally judged of by people who understood neither the grounds nor the consequences of their decrees.  In all matters transcending mere communal affairs the Roman primary assemblies accordingly played a childish and even silly part.  As a rule, the people stood and gave assent to all proposals; and, when in exceptional instances they of their own impulse refused assent, as on occasion of the declaration of war against Macedonia in 554,(42) the policy of the market-place certainly made a pitiful opposition—­and with a pitiful issue—­to the policy of the state.