votes of the first class were reduced to 70, with the result that under all circumstances at least the second grade came to vote.  Still more important, and indeed the real central element of the reform, was the connection into which the new voting divisions were brought with the tribal arrangement.  Formerly the centuries originated from the tribes on the footing, that whoever belonged to a tribe had to be enrolled by the censor in one of the centuries.  From the time that the non-freehold burgesses had been enrolled in the tribes, they too came thus into the centuries, and, while they were restricted in the -comitia tributa- to the four urban divisions, they had in the -comitia centuriata- formally the same right with the freehold burgesses, although probably the censorial arbitrary prerogative intervened in the composition of the centuries, and granted to the burgesses enrolled in the rural tribes the preponderance also in the centuriate assembly.  This preponderance was established by the reformed arrangement on the legal footing, that of the 70 centuries of the first class, two were assigned to each tribe and, accordingly, the non-freehold burgesses obtained only eight of them; in a similar way the preponderance must have been conceded also in the four other grades to the freehold burgesses.  In a like spirit the previous equalization of the freedmen with the free-born in the right of voting was set aside at this time, and even the freehold freedmen were assigned to the four urban tribes.  This was done in the year 534 by one of the most notable men of the party of reform, the censor Gaius Flaminius, and was then repeated and more stringently enforced fifty years later (585) by the censor Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, the father of the two authors of the Roman revolution.  This reform of the centuries, which perhaps in its totality proceeded likewise from Flaminius, was the first important constitutional change which the new opposition wrung from the nobility, the first victory of the democracy proper.  The pith of it consists partly in the restriction of the censorial arbitrary rule, partly in the restriction of the influence of the nobility on the one hand, and of the non-freeholders and the freedmen on the other, and so in the remodelling of the centuriate comitia according to the principle which already held good for the comitia of the tribes; a course which commended itself by the circumstance that elections, projects of law, criminal impeachments, and generally all affairs requiring the co-operation of the burgesses, were brought throughout to the comitia of the tribes and the more unwieldy centuries were but seldom called together, except where it was constitutionally necessary or at least usual, in order to elect the censors, consuls, and praetors, and in order to resolve upon an aggressive war.