century, of a minister being called to account for his misdemeanors, because he has proved himself an exceptionally outrageous rascal, or because he has aroused a passionate hatred against his person, the impeachment proceeds in a pompous and imposing manner, but terminates in an absurdly insignificant sentence. The Parliament is an institution for the satisfaction of vanity and ambition and for the furtherance of the personal interests of the members. The people has been for thousands of years in the habit of submitting to a sovereign will and of showing honors to a privileged aristocracy, in whose hands they left all the funds of the State for their personal use. Certain enlightened minds, capable of seeing into the future, gave them a form of government in representative legislation, which permitted them to set up their own will as the sovereign power and to deprive the aristocracy of their control of the public finances. What did the people do? They hastened to put on representative legislation, but on top of their old habits, so that now as much as ever before, they are ruled by an individual will and they are plundered by a privileged class; only this will is no longer called the king, but the leader of his party and the privileged class, not the aristocracy, but the majority in the House. The old relation between the average citizen and the State remains unaltered; my Hans to whom I am always returning, continues to pay taxes whose amount he does not fix himself and whose expenditure he can not control, he must obey laws which he did not impose upon himself and whose utility he fails to recognize, he must take off his hat to the public employé that another's will has set up over him, whether his name be Johnny in England, Ivan in Russia or Hans in the German-speaking countries.
Parliamentism has one advantage; it makes it possible
