This joint action of the burgesses in governing and in commanding was fraught in a high degree with peril.  But still more dangerous was their interference with the finances of the state; not only because any attack on the oldest and most important right of the government —­the exclusive administration of the public property—­struck at the root of the power of the senate, but because the placing of the most important business of this nature—­the distribution of the public domains—­in the hands of the primary assemblies of the burgesses necessarily dug the grave of the republic.  To allow the primary assembly to decree the transference of public property without limit to its own pocket is not only wrong, but is the beginning of the end; it demoralizes the best-disposed citizens, and gives to the proposer a power incompatible with a free commonwealth.  Salutary as was the distribution of the public land, and doubly blameable as was the senate accordingly for omitting to cut off this most dangerous of all weapons of agitation by voluntarily distributing the occupied lands, yet Gaius Flaminius, when he came to the burgesses in 522 with the proposal to distribute the domains of Picenum, undoubtedly injured the commonwealth more by the means than he benefited it by the end.  Spurius Cassius had doubtless two hundred and fifty years earlier proposed the same thing;(70) but the two measures, closely as they coincided in the letter, were yet wholly different, inasmuch as Cassius submitted a matter affecting the community to that community while it was in vigour and self-governing, whereas Flaminius submitted a question of state to the primary assembly of a great empire.

Nullity of the Comitia

Not the party of the government only, but the party of reform also, very properly regarded the military, executive, and financial government as the legitimate domain of the senate, and carefully abstained from making full use of, to say nothing of augmenting, the formal power vested in primary assemblies that were inwardly doomed to inevitable dissolution.  Never even in the most limited monarchy was a part so completely null assigned to the monarch as was allotted to the sovereign Roman people:  this was no doubt in more than one respect to be regretted, but it was, owing to the existing state of the comitial machine, even in the view of the friends of reform a matter of necessity.  For this reason Cato and those who shared his views never submitted to the burgesses a question, which trenched on government strictly so called; and never, directly or indirectly, by decree of the burgesses extorted from the senate the political or financial measures which they wished, such as the declaration of war against Carthage and the assignations of land.  The government of the senate might be bad; the primary assemblies could not govern at all.  Not that an evil-disposed majority predominated in them; on the contrary the counsel of a man of standing, the