There had been no political reform under Rama V: the king was still an absolute monarch, who acted as his own prime minister and staffed all the agencies of the state with his own relatives. Vajiravhud, with his British education, knew that the rest of the nation could not be excluded from government for ever, but he was no democrat. He applied his observation of the success of the British monarchy, appearing more in public and instituting more royal ceremonies. But he also carried on his father's modernisation programme. Polygamy was abolished, primary education made compulsory, and in 1916 higher education came to Siam with the founding of Chulalongkorn University, which in time became the seedbed of a new Siamese intelligentsia.