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But though the popular assemblies were thus free from patrician control, and the magistrates, subject only to the self-imposed limitation of taking advice from the Senate, could elicit any utterance they pleased from the comitia, there was one grave defect in the existing system of legislation which called for remedy. The plebeian magistracy, which circumstances had raised to a pre-eminence above all other powers, had not the freedom of the other magistrates. The rogationes of the tribunes, when accepted by the Plebs, still required some further sanction to become laws. This anomaly might have been remedied in one of two ways; either by giving the tribune the right of summoning and presiding over meetings 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,[486] but which seems to have been of a very different and far more definite character. The lawyers[487] 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,[488] and even legal formulae use the words as practically identical.[489] A law could repeal a plebiscite and a plebiscite a law;[490] in the case of a conflict between the two, the rule of the Twelve Tables held good that the later repealed the earlier ordinance.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,[491] 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 elicits is a decree of the comitia or the concilium. The difference in the legislative powers of the two assemblies came in course of time to be little more than a difference in magisterial right;[492] while the comitia of the centuries and tribes were presided over by magistrates with the imperium, the concilium of the Plebs could be summoned and addressed only by plebeian magistrates. Yet the past history of the various assemblies was decisive as to their elective and judicial functions, and practice tended still further to fix the scope of the powers of each. But at the time of the lex Hortensia the difference between the two parliamentary sovereigns—the Populus and the Plebs—was even more marked; for the Patricians, excluded from the concilium, were still a considerable body, and the tribune had not yet become, like the magistrates with imperium, quite a servant of the Senate.[493] The Hortensian law had at the time a political significance which it afterwards lost; but it had a hidden import which was of vital consequence for the history of the state. By perpetuating the Plebs as a separate corporation it preserved the tribunate in all its primitive majesty, and thus maintained the power subsequently to be used as an instrument of senatorial and monarchical rule.