We believe our form of government to be better than any monarchy because _the people choose their own law-makers_. The Congress is composed of two houses or chambers: the members of the Senate, chosen by the legislatures of the States, two from each State, to serve for six years; the members of the House of Representatives (chosen by the citizens), who sit for two years only, unless re-elected. The Senate is supposed to be the more conservative body, not easily moved by popular clamor; while the Representatives, chosen directly and recently by the voters, are supposed to know the immediate wants of the people. The thought of two houses grew probably from the two houses of the British parliament. We cannot have an _hereditary legislature_ like the House of Lords in the British parliament, whose members sit, as the sovereign rules, by divine right, as they say, and with the same result in some instances: for the sovereign may be a mere figure-head, or only the nominal ruler, while the cabinet is the real government, and the House of Lords long ago sunk far below the House of Commons in real influence. There is no better reason for this than the fact that the people have nothing to do with the House of Lords and the sovereign, except to depose and scatter them when they choose to rise in their power and assert themselves. We can have no _orders of nobility_ under our Constitution. There can be no privileged class. All men are equal under the law. I do not mean that all persons are equal in all respects. Divine Providence has made us unequal. Some are endowed naturally with the highest mental and physical gifts and distinctions; some are strong and others weak. This has always been so and always will be so. Some have inherited or acquired riches, while others have to labor diligently to make a bare living. Some have inherited their high culture and gentle manners and noble instincts, which, in a general sense, we sometimes call culture; and others have to acquire all this for themselves――and it is not very easy to get it. So there is no such thing as absolute equality, and cannot be; but before the law, in the enjoyment of our rights and in the undisturbed possession of what we have, we are all equal, as we could not be under a monarchy. Here there is no legal bar to success; all places are open to all. There can be no law of _primogeniture_ under our Constitution. By this law, which still prevails in England, the eldest son inherits the titles and estates of the father, while the younger sons and all the daughters must be provided for in other ways. Some of the sons are put in the church, in the army or the navy, or in the professions, such as law and medicine; but it is very rare indeed that any son of a noble house is willing to engage in any kind of business or trade, for they are not so well thought of if they become tradesmen.