Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 07.djvu/229

Rh into the thoughts and schemes of the Government, but also into the popular mind, is manifest when the weightiest constitutional questions are discussed. Both people and Government seek to explain or profit by the Constitution according to their own private feelings. The people are misled to this by writers and orators, who, either from uncertainty or party feeling, endeavour to pervert ideas. The Government is misled by that fraction of the aristocracy which, devoted through selfishness, form the present Court, and still regard, as they did during the Restoration, the representative system as a modern superstition to which the people cling, and which cannot be turned from them by force, yet which may be rendered harmless by slipping in under the new names and forms old personalities and ideas, and that without its being perceived. According to the conceptions of such men, he is the greatest Minister who can effect as much with the new constitutional formulas as was formerly achieved with the formulas of the old régime. Such a Minister was Villéle, of whom, however, when Perier fell ill, no one ventured to think, though they indeed had courage to consider Decazes. He would certainly have been appointed Minister, if the new Court had not feared that it would be soon supplanted by the members of the old. They feared lest he might bring the whole Restoration with him into