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128 desired parliamentary majority; and as the party out of office could always trump their opponents' performances by boasting of the much greater things they would do when in power, and being hungry for office, would make greater pecuniary sacrifices to obtain it, they usually contrived to oust their opponents and secure their own turn of power.

In former times there had been an upper house of parliament, or "chamber of first-borns," as it was termed. It seems that the original authors of the constitution of Colymbia feared that if legislation were limited to one elective chamber it would be very apt to go on too fast, that the active spirits of the country, who would naturally be elected by the people, would be always altering the constitution, and introducing premature reforms; so they resolved to create a second chamber, which should consist of members of inferior mental activity, who would naturally be slow to move, and would act as a check on the exuberant activity of the more popular chamber. The sage framers of the constitution seem to have held, with the elder Shandy, and probably for the same physiological reasons, that first-borns must necessarily be of duller intellect than the cadets of a family; so they ordained that the upper house should consist of a number of members selected by lot exclusively from first-borns, to each of whom a handsome salary was paid for his services. To this chamber was assigned the duty of revising all the measures of the popular chamber, and vetoing them if they thought fit. The plan seemed to have worked pretty well at first, but in course of time, the members of the chamber of first-borns grew indifferent to the purely negative rôle they had to play, and could seldom be got to meet in sufficient numbers