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This discontent was the opportunity of the richer Plebeians,[454] who wished to secure perfect political equality between the orders. In 378 loud cries were raised against the capitalists; a war with the Volsci gave the tribunes the chance of impeding the military levy, and some temporary concessions to debtors were unwillingly wrung from the government.[455] When the next year saw the burdens reimposed, two ambitious Plebeians, L. Sextius and C. Licinius Stolo, came forward with the proposition that the only sure way of permanently remedying the evils of the lower class was by securing one of the places in the consulship to members of their own order. They formulated a programme which was an attractive jumble of social and political measures. The plebiscitum which they promulgated promised a temporary relief from debt, proposed a limit to the amount of public land which any individual might possess, and declared that the military tribunate should be abolished, the consulship should be restored, and that one of the two consuls must henceforth be a Plebeian. This comprehensive measure, which attacked land, capital, and office,[456] was easily met. The two tribunes stood alone, and their eight colleagues were without difficulty induced to put their veto on the revolutionary measure. But it was soon shown that, if the veto might be used against the interest of the Plebs, the negative powers of the tribunes might be employed, with as much legality and as little justification, to paralyse the life of the state. The two tribunes, in virtue of the paramount authority which their sacrosanctitas had in the course of years secured to them, forbade the election of any magistrate of the people. For five years successively Licinius and Sextius were re-elected tribunes; during the whole of this period (375-371) the only magistrates appointed were the plebeian aediles and tribunes, and the state was without a head. A war with Velitrae led the tribunes to relax their anarchical edict for the year 370. But the long stand had reduced the number of vetoing tribunes to five. Another clause was now added to the original proposals to the effect that the two duumviri sacris faciundis, the keepers of the sacred books, the storehouse which furnished political intrigue with its surest weapons, should be raised to ten, and that half of these decemviri should be Plebeians.[457] None of the tribunes of 368 seems to have been prepared to offer any effectual resistance to any of the provisions of the law,[458] and the Patricians, driven from their first stronghold, took refuge in a dictator. It was a sign that they had lost the game, for the dictatorship could not be perpetuated. But it required the most strenuous exertions of the leaders of the Plebs to keep their followers up to the level of their original demands. The spiritless commons who had failed to elect members of their own order, consular tribunes and quaestors, when it had been in their power to do so, were for dividing the proposals, passing the social measures at once and leaving the question of the consulship for a future time. But Licinius and Sextius were not prepared to be social leaders without reward. The only division to which they subjected the complicated measure was to carry in 368 the clause sharing the new decemvirate with the Plebeians; the other clauses were postponed. In the next year, 367 B.C., they were tribunes for the tenth time. The opposition was worn out, and the Licinio-Sextian laws were passed in their original form. The greatest of plebeian victories had been won; from this time the Plebs is really the dominant element in the state. It was of little consequence that it did not assert its omnipotence for some years yet; all that it desired further was bound to come. As the magistracy was far more powerful than the people at Rome, the body that exercised the whole of the highest prohibitive power through the tribunate, and monopolised half of the highest positive authority in the consulship, was bound to be supreme. Even the purely patrician privilege of the patrum auctoritas was no great disturbance to this power. It became more a matter of form, the more the plebeian element entered into the Senate.