The Reporter of the French Committee of Thirty, M. Ventavon,
has laid his proposal before the Assembly. We have commented on it elsewhere, but may remark here that its central idea is to invest Marshal MacMahon with all the powers nominally possessed by our own Sovereign. He is to be irresponsible and his Ministers responsible, and inject, the Constitution ls to be the English one, with this difference,—that the Marshal is to use the powers of which the Queen is only the depositary, and that the responsibility of Ministers, though secured by law, is, in fact, null, the Marshal openly refusing to exchange them. The proposal would therefore amount, as one Deputy exclaimed, to "a sunstroke for Parliamentary Government," the irresponsible Marshal being, in fact, made master of the Assembly by the right of dissolution, by the right of appointing a co-ordinate Second Chamber, and by the right of initiating revisions of the Constitu- tion. M. Ventavon specially said that the final adoption of a form of Government would be reserved till 1880. The Assembly received the proposal with marked disfavour, and it is generally regarded as dead already.
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