cides to keep
Yon in office; nevertheless, the National Assembly, frightened by its
own violence in the affair of Mauguin, and accustomed, every time it has
shied a blow at the Executive, to receive back from it two in exchange,
does not sanction this decision. It dismisses Yon in reward for his zeal
in office, and robs itself of a parliamentary prerogative, indispensable
against a person who does not decide by night to execute by day, but
decides by day and executes by night.

We have seen how, during the months of November and December, under
great and severe provocations, the National Assembly evaded and refused
the combat with the Executive power. Now we see it compelled to accept
it on the smallest occasions. In the affair of Mauguin, it confirms in
principle the liability of a Representative to imprisonment for debt,
but to itself reserves the power of allowing the principle to be applied
only to the Representatives whom it dislikes,-and for this infamous
privilege we see it wrangling with the Minister of Justice. Instead of
utilizing the alleged murder plan to the end of fastening an inquest
upon the "Society of December 10," and of exposing Bonaparte beyond
redemption before France and his true figure, as the head of the
slum-proletariat of Paris, it allows the collision to sink to a point
where the only issue between itself and the Minister of the Interior
is. Who has jurisdiction over the appointment and dismissal of a Police
Commissioner? Thus we see the party of Order, during this whole period,
compelled by its ambiguous position to wear out and fritter away its
conflict with the Executive power in small quarrels about jurisdiction,
in chicaneries, in pettifogging, in boundary disputes, and to turn the
stalest questions of form into the very substance of its activity.
It dares not accept the collision at the moment when it involves a
principle, when the Executive power has really given itself a blank,
and when the cause of the National Assembly would be the cause of the
nation. It would thereby have issued to the nation an order of march;
and it feared nothing so much as that the nation should move. Hence, on
these occasions, it rejects the motions of the Mountain, and proceeds
to the order of the day. After the issue has in this way lost all
magnitude, the Executive power quietly awaits the moment when it can
take it up again upon small and insignificant occasions; when, so to
say, the issue offers only a p