[p. 118]
|118| willing to take on. It was overlooked in this project (and here perhaps honestly, what in others has been arranged with full consciousness and complete intention) that the appointment of the persons of the ministry and of the other officials of the executive power is in itself something formal and powerless, and in the matter falls to where the governmental power effectively resides. This we see in England in Parliament; if in the manifold monarchical constitutions whose creation we have lived to see the formal separation of the governmental power, as the executive, from a merely legislative and judicial power is pronounced, and the former is even set forth with pomp and distinction, then the filling of the ministry has always become the centre of contestation and of struggle – notwithstanding the right of this filling unconditionally ascribed to the Crown – and the so-called merely legislative power has carried off the victory; so too under the newest constitution of France, in the daily political and other interpellations and contestations, the tendency is not to be mistaken to compel the ministry to transfer the headquarters of the government into the Chamber of Deputies, where it itself has been brought to the point of having to engage with its subordinate officials in public contestations.
A relation to the governmental power lying in Parliament is had in the first place by what the opponents of the Reform Bill adduce in favour of the rotten boroughs, through the possession of which many seats in Parliament depend on individuals or families, namely that by means of this circumstance the most distinguished statesmen of England have found the way into Parliament and from there into the ministry. It will indeed happen that a distinguished
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