to perform their proper functions, preferring to spend their time in sports, amusements, or money-making occupations; the skill they displayed and the success they achieved in these pursuits proving that the physiological theory ascribing to them intellectual inferiority was not altogether well founded. Or, if they did exercise their power of veto, it was usually done with respect to some measure which the popular assembly and the country had set their hearts on. As intelligence advanced the people and their elected members grew impatient of the check imposed on their wishes by the chamber of first-borns. The members of the popular chamber chafed at the idea of the fruits of their sagacity and intelligence being liable to rejection by a council of hypothetical dullards, and repeatedly urged the Government to devise some means for putting a stop to this intolerable censorship.
In this state of feeling the minister of the period, who shared the popular feeling, had little difficulty in doing away entirely with the chamber of first-borns, which had come to be considered as altogether out of date and as a useless drag on the machinery of the state. Very little excitement was produced in the country by the abrogation of the upper house, and few even of its members regretted their political extinction, as they had long silently chafed at their imputed mental incapacity. The popular chamber was thus left free to effect those constant changes and reforms which were its chief occupation and pleasure, and which were constantly demanded by the change-loving people, or the demagogues who constituted themselves the exponents of popular wishes.
The kings, seeing all power in the state gradually slipping away from them, made no effort to retain
