A bill had been introduced into the Hereditary Chamber relating to the elections. I declared myself in favour of the integral renewal of the Chamber of Deputies. It was not until 1824, being then a minister, that I passed it into law. It was also in this first speech on the law governing elections, in 1816[10], that I said, in reply to an opponent: "I will not refer to what has been said about Europe watching our discussions. Speaking for myself, gentlemen, I doubtless owe to the French blood that flows in my veins the impatience which I experience when, in order to influence my vote, people talk to me of opinions existing outside my country; and, if civilized Europe tried to impose the Charter on me, I should go to live in Constantinople." [Sidenote: The Chamber of Peers.] On the 9th of April 1816, I introduced a motion to the Chamber relating to the Barbary Powers. The house decided that there was cause for its discussion. I was already thinking of combating slavery, before I obtained that favourable decision from the Peers, which was the first political intervention of a great Power on behalf of the Greeks: "I have seen the ruins of Carthage," I said to my colleagues; "I have met among those ruins the successors of the unhappy Christians for whose deliverance St. Louis sacrificed his life. Philosophy can take its share of the glory attached to the success of my motion and boast of having obtained in an age of light that for which religion strove in vain in an age of darkness." I found myself in an assembly in which my words, for three-fourths of the time, turned against myself. One can move a popular chamber; an aristocratic chamber is deaf. With no gallery, speaking in private before old men, dried-up remains of the old Monarchy, of the Revolution and of the Empire, anything that rose above the most commonplace seemed madness. One day, the front row of arm-chairs, quite close to the tribune, was filled with venerable peers, one more deaf than the other, their heads bent forward, and holding to their ears a trumpet with the mouth turned towards the tribune. I sent them to sleep, which is very natural. One of them dropped his ear-trumpet; his neighbour, awakened by the fall, wanted politely to pick up his colleague's trumpet; he fell down. The worst of it was that I began to laugh, although I was just then speaking pathetically on some subject of humanity, I forget what.