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But, the critics observe, the Constitution is being violated. It is difficult to conceive of a more inconsistent charge, or one which is, moreover, based on more inadequate good faith. It is strange indeed to find those very people—Socialists and such-like—who want to destroy the bourgeois State and subvert far more than the Constitution, filled with touching tenderness for that same Constitution! Even among the Parliamentary Oppositions this pretended scandal is but an insincere pretext, for you will remember that it is from that very quarter that after the war some of the most radical proposals of Constitutional reform emanated. It was these same Constitutional zealots who then proposed that the King should be deprived of the prerogative of declaring war, that the composition of the Senate should be reformed by suppressing the King's right to appoint the Senators and making them elective. The proportional system was introduced into the elections, thereby radically altering the existing representative system based on majority elections, that is to say, substituting for a system based on a majority governing indepenently of and if need be against the
