Here was a grand opportunity for the senators of showing their power, and of earning the 30,000 francs that they each received from their master.
Yet what happened?
Not one voice was raised by the Senate against the act of the deputies.
Better still: nobody thought of taking the trouble to dismiss them officially. In presence of the strong will of the people, they packed up their traps quietly, and, to the best of my recollection, even forgot to go to the counting-house to receive their month's pay.
Poor senators! they seemed to have the measure of their power in stormy times to an inch.
In presence of the will of the nation, strongly manifested, the House of Lords would be as powerless as the French Senate was in 1870.
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A strange application of that great English principle, "the right man in the right place," is the existence of this same Upper House in England!
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What! can it be that this, the most sensible nation of the world, who has withdrawn all the privileges of its monarchs, who has imposed restrictions upon them, and will not even allow them to make the slightest political allusion in public, can it be this nation that has given itself so many masters at once? If the English do not allow their kings unlimited power, it is because, in their wisdom, they fear that those kings may be born fools, or grow into despots; but out of five hundred lords, three or four hundred may be born fools; where then is the gain? Better be governed by one fool than by three or four hundred.