[p. 125]
|125| legislative power, becomes in so far more merely illusory as the cabinet is again the same ministry incorporated in Parliament. Earl Grey has declared in response to that reproach that in the introduction of the Bill by the ministry the royal assent is already contained of itself, but has deflected the blame for the express narration that it has the King’s approval only by saying that this mention had proceeded not from the ministers but from elsewhere.
The peculiar division which could be brought into Parliament by the new men would therefore not be the struggle with which each of the several French constitutions began every time, over whether the governmental power should really belong to the King and his ministry, to which side it was expressly assigned; in the condition of English state administration it has long been decided what in France always first required a decisive authentic interpretation through insurrections and acts of violence of the insurgent people. The innovation of the Reform Bill can therefore affect only the effective governmental power, which is established in Parliament; this suffers, according to the hitherto existing condition, only superficial fluctuations which appear as changes of ministries, no true division through principles; a new ministry belongs to the same class of interests and of statesmen to which the preceding one belonged. {The requisite preponderant strength which it needs as a party it gains partly through the number of members who count as independent and who on the whole place themselves on the side of every ministry, in the feeling that a government must exist, partly however through the influence which it is able to exercise on the filling of a number of parliamentary seats.} Even if now the so-called interest of agriculture seems to have declared that it will find
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