It was as King of Prussia, however, that he really exercised the greatest power, and thus vicariously strengthened his powers in the empire at large. The parliamentary system of Prussia was archaic and designed to make impossible any really democratic government or a too severe limitation upon the powers of the King. It was, like the Imperial Parliament, made up of two chambers, a House of Lords and a Diet. The upper chamber, the House of Lords, was composed of men appointed by the King, either for a fixed term or for life. It goes without saying that all these men were strong supporters of the monarchic system and outspoken enemies of democracy. No legislation could be enacted against their will. The composition of the Diet, moreover, was such that the House of Lords had until very recent years little to fear in the way of democratic legislation. It was elected by the so-called three-class system, under which a wealthy man frequently had greater voting power than his five hundred employees together. The ballot moreover was indirect, the delegates being elected by a complicated system of electors. In addition to all this, the ballot was open, not secret. This placed a powerful weapon in the hands of the employing classes generally and of the great estate-owners particularly. The polling-places in rural districts were generally located on land belonging to one of these estates, and the election officials were either the estate-owners themselves or men dependent on them. In these circumstances it took a brave man to vote otherwise than his employer desired, and there was no way of concealing for whom or what party he had voted. Bismarck himself, reactionary and conservative as he was, once termed the Prussian three-class voting-system "the most iniquitous of all franchise systems." Around this a fight had waged for several years before the revolution. The Kaiser, as King of Prussia, flatly promised, in his address from the throne in 1908, that the system should be reformed. It is a matter of simple justice to record that he made the promise in good faith and tried to see that it was kept. His efforts along this line were thwarted by a small clique of men who were determined "to protect the King against himself," and who, lacking even the modicum of political prescience possessed by the Kaiser-King, failed to see that if they did not make a concession willingly they would eventually be forced to make a concession of much greater extent. From year to year measures to reform the three-class system were introduced, only to be killed by the House of Lords. Under the stress of the closing days of the war such a measure was perfected and would have become a law had not the revolution intervened. But it came too late, just as did scores of other reforms undertaken in the eleventh hour.