[p. 126]
|126| its account in the mode of election to be newly introduced, and a large part of the hitherto existing patronages of parliamentary seats and of the combinations of their venality retains its standing, it cannot be otherwise than that the class hitherto ruling in Parliament, which offers every ministry a ready material for the hitherto existing system of the social condition, suffers a modification through the introduction of new people and heterogeneous principles. The Reform Bill by itself impairs the hitherto existing basis of this system, namely the principle of merely positive right, which secures to the privileges, whatever relation they may have to the rights of real freedom, their possession. If claims of a new kind, which have hitherto made themselves heard hardly in unconscious stammering and more in the indeterminate fear of them than in actual demand, come to be discussed in Parliament, the opposition changes its character; the parties receive another object than merely the taking possession of the ministry.
If we take up this character of an opposition, different from the hitherto existing one, in its extreme, as it appears in France, it is marked most eloquently in the astonishment which {recently there} in France is made known at every change of ministry over the fact that the individuals who pass from the opposition into the ministry now conduct themselves approximately according to the same maxims as the ousted predecessors; one reads naively in French opposition papers complaints that so many distinguished individuals, in passing through ministerial functions, have become unfaithful to the left side to which they formerly belonged, and turn back, i.e. that, if they earlier did indeed admit in abstracto that there is to be a government, they have now learned what governing really is, and that something further belongs to it than principles. These consist there, as is well known, in the general notions of freedom, equality,
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