Youth and First Years in Stockholm 45 breach with Christianity, and to declare her reasons for it. In Ellen Key's home there was the same aversion to class prejudices and class preten- sions as prevailed among all Liberals preceding the change in the system of representation, which change principally resulted in the abrogation of the nobleman's right of rule in the Riksdag. Consequently their high pedi- gree had no place in the children's imagination, and they never heard any talk conducive to family pride. Ellen once wrote: "I inherited no prejudice from my father or mother, and I have never heard from them anything but respect for human life, for liberty, laboiir, and progress." Ellen yet had as a child such a passion for all family-history, even in the meagre form of the Peerage Calendar and Swedish Genealogy, that she eagerly perused these and pondered the fates of the people narrated therein. When, later, as a young girl, —about the time that the theory of evolution was beginning to prepare minds for the significance of heredity, —she learned of her ancestors, their romantic history filled her with pride. Harald Harfager, for instance, had united the many small kingdoms of Norway