console the fallen "Bulwark of Society" with an official
testimony of their sympathy. They themselves could not deny the
constitutional right of the President to remove a General. They stormed
only because he made an unparliamentary use of his constitutional right.
Had they not themselves constantly made an unconstitutional use of
their parliamentary prerogative, notably by the abolition of universal
suffrage? Consequently they were reminded to move exclusively within
parliamentary bounds. Indeed, it required that peculiar disease,
a disease that, since 1848, has raged over the whole continent,
"Parliamentary Idiocy,"--that fetters those whom it infects to an
imaginary world, and robs them of all sense, all remembrance,
all understanding of the rude outside world;--it required this
"Parliamentary Idiocy" in order that the party of Order, which had, with
its own hands, destroyed all the conditions for parliamentary power,
and, in its struggle with the other classes, was obliged to destroy
them, still should consider its parliamentary victories as victories,
and imagine it hit the President by striking his Ministers. They only
afforded him an opportunity to humble the National Assembly anew in the
eyes of the nation. On January 20, the "Moniteur" announced that the
whole the dismissal of the whole Ministry was accepted. Under the
pretext that none of the parliamentary parties had any longer the
majority--as proved by the January 18 vote, that fruit of the
coalition between mountain and royalists--, and, in order to await the
re-formation of a majority, Bonaparte appointed a so-called transition
Ministry, of whom no member belonged to the parliament-altogether wholly
unknown and insignificant individuals; a Ministry of mere clerks and
secretaries. The party of Order could now wear itself out in the game
with these puppets; the Executive power no longer considered it worth
the while to be seriously represented in the National Assembly. By
this act Bonaparte concentrated the whole executive power all the more
securely in his own person; he had all the freer elbow-room to
exploit the same to his own ends, the more his Ministers became mere
supernumeraries.

The party of Order, now allied with the Mountain, revenged itself by
rejecting the Presidential endowment project of 1,800.000 francs, which
the chief of the "Society of December 10" had compelled his Ministerial
clerks to present to the Assembly. This time a majority of o