y. Some of the members went into the legislature, some into
official administrative positions, and the right of discussion in
committee behind closed doors was transferred to certain sections of
the legislature. By way of compensation it was "decreed by the
senate," as the formality was called, that no man could thenceforth
sit in the legislature until he had reached the age of forty. Perhaps
Napoleon remembered that his own fiery ambition had made him emperor
before he was thirty-six. The measure was announced to the tribunes as
a mere matter of course, and created no stir at the time. In later
years it was recalled that the English Parliament under the
Plantagenets had never entirely perished, and so was ready for
powerful deeds in more propitious days. But in France's later crisis
the French tribunate could not be revived; with it disappeared forever
the last rallying-point for the scattered remnant still true to the
Revolution.

The complement of this negative measure was the creation of the right
to transmit together, and for an indefinite time, a title and the
realty on which its dignity reposed. Though the restoration of this
institution was slightly anterior in time to the other as to its
beginnings, yet the final decree was not published until 1808, and
logically it is complementary and subsequent to it. To this day many
men of ancient and honorable name in France have not ceased to bemoan
the destruction of primogeniture by the Revolution and the Code
Napoleon. They are proud to transmit their title untarnished to their
descendants, are ready to make serious sacrifices in its behalf, to
exercise the rigid self-denials of family control for its sake, and to
engrave the motto of "noblesse oblige" on their hearts in order to
sustain it; but they bitterly complain that without the majorat, and
the transmission of outward, visible supports in land and houses to
strengthen it, the empty sound carries little weight. The compulsory
subdivision of estates at the death of the owner enables every scion
to live, if not to thrive, on the home stock. The failure of France in
colonization is largely due to the absence of men from good families
among the colonizers, while England sends her younger sons to the ends
of the earth, there to found new houses and perpetuate the old line
under favorable conditions. Hence, too, the petty dimensions of
aristocratic French life: little fortunes, little ambitions, little
establishments