Among these was a law providing for compulsory education, and decreeing that no illiterate born after the beginning of Liholiho's reign should hold office, and that no illiterate man or woman, born after the same date, could marry.
An ordinance passed in 1827, abolishing the old Dutch courts of landroost and heemraden (resident magistrates being substituted) and decreeing that henceforth all legal proceedings should be conducted in English; the granting in 1828, as a result of the representations of the missionaries, of equal rights with whites to the Hottentots and other free coloured people; the imposition (1830) of heavy penalties for harsh treatment of slaves, and finally the emancipation of the slaves in 1834,3 - all these things increased the dislike of the farmers to the government.
On the 26th of September he was re-elected by the same departments; on the 11th of October the law decreeing the banishment of the Bonapartes was abrogated; on the 26th he made a speech in the Assembly defending his position as a pretender, and cut such a sorry figure that Antony Thouret contemptuously withdrew the amendment by which he had intended to bar him from rising to the presidency.
On the other hand, after the 23rd of September they declared Paris dangerous for the Convention, and wanted to reduce it to eighty-three influential members Danton and the Mountain responded by decreeing the unity and indivisibility of the Republic, in order to emphasize the suspicions of federalism which weighed upon the Girondins.
In 1825 the reactionary parlement once more brought back the middle ages, by decreeing the death penalty for public profanation, the execution to be preceded by the amende honorable before the church doors.
