nsisting simply of the nine heads of departments under
the presidency of an additional minister designated by the crown, and
to this body are referred in practice many minor subjects that call
for consideration.

The ministers, so the constitution affirms, are responsible for the
conduct of the government.[791] The king's signature of a measure
gives it legal character only if accompanied by the signature of one
or more of the ministers, and ministers may be called to account by
the Folkething, as well as by the king, for their conduct in office.
There is, furthermore, a special Court of Impeachment for the trial of
ministers against whom charges are brought. On the surface, these
arrangements seem to imply the existence of a parliamentary system of
government, with a ministry answerable singly and collectively to the
popular legislative chamber. In point of fact, however, there has been
all the while much less parliamentarism in Denmark than seemingly is
contemplated in the constitution, and it is hardly too much to say
that since the adoption of the present constitution the most
interminable of political controversies in the kingdom has been that
centering about the question of the responsibility of ministers. Until
at least within the past decade, the practice of the crown has been
regularly to appoint ministers independently and to maintain them in
office in disregard of, and even in defiance of, the wishes of the
popular branch of the legislature. The desire of the Liberals has been
to inaugurate a thoroughgoing parliamentary regime, under which the
sovereign should be obligated to select his ministers from the party
in control of the Folkething and the ministers, in turn, should be
responsible to the Folkething, in fact as well as in theory, for all
of their official acts. Throughout the prolonged period covered by the
ministry of Jakob Estrup (1875-1894) the conflict upon this issue was
incessant. During the whole of the period Estrup and his colleagues
commanded the support of a majority in the Landsthing, but were
accorded the votes of only a minority in the lower chamber. After the
elections of 1884, indeed, the Government could rely upon a total of
not more than nineteen votes in that chamber.

[Footnote 791: Art. 12. Dodd, Modern Constitutions,
I., 268.]

*617. The Establishment of Ministerial Responsibility.*--Under the
continued stress of this situation constitution