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 of the people, making him in fact a magistrate of the community, and thus abolishing all distinction between Populus and Plebs, or removing the impediments which still hampered tribunician legislation in the concilium plebis. The conservatism of the Roman character, and perhaps the class feeling reviving again at the beginning of the third century in consequence of a renewed outbreak of the Plebs, caused the latter course to be adopted. In the year 287 the commons, oppressed by debt, again seceded—this time to the Janiculum. The plebeian dictator appointed to effect a settlement met social grievances by a political concession. He passed a law which most of our authorities represent as verbally identical with the Valerio-Horatian and Publilian laws, but which seems to have been of a very different and far more definite character. The lawyers regard the lex Hortensia as the measure which gave decrees of the Plebs the full force of laws. Henceforth there is between lex and plebiscitum merely a difference of form and name; their potestas is the same, and even legal formulae use the words as practically identical. A law could repeal a plebiscite and a plebiscite a law; in the case of a conflict between the two, the rule of the Twelve Tables held good that the later repealed the earlier ordinance. It is not, therefore, surprising to find that in the annalists, even those with pretensions to accuracy, Populus and Plebs are used indifferently, and it is only at times by carefully noting who is the presiding magistrate on the particular occasion, that we can determine whether the ordinance he elicitslege plebeive scito, quod C. Sempronius Ti. f. tr. pl. rogavit." Cf. lex Rubria (ib.) "ex lege Rubria seive id pl. sc. est."]