the President's chair and joined the soldiers outside, whom he harangued in the character of President of the Assembly. The soldiers, hitherto wavering, were assured by Lucien's civil authority and his treacherous eloquence. The drums beat; the word of command was given; and the last free representatives of France struggled through doorways and windows before the levelled and advancing bayonets. [Siéyès' plan of Constitution.] The Constitution which Siéyès hoped now to impose upon France had been elaborated by its author at the close of the Reign of Terror. Designed at that epoch, it bore the trace of all those apprehensions which gave shape to the Constitution of 1795. The statutory outrages of 1793, the Royalist reaction shown in the events of Vendémiaire, were the perils from which both Siéyès and the legislators of 1795 endeavoured to guard the future of France. It had become clear that a popular election might at any moment return a royalist majority to the Assembly: the Constitution of 1795 averted this danger by prolonging the power of the Conventionalists; Siéyès overcame it by extinguishing popular election altogether. He gave to the nation no right but that of selecting half a million persons who should be eligible to offices in the Communes, and who should themselves elect a smaller body of fifty thousand, eligible to offices in the Departments. The fifty thousand were in their turn to choose five thousand, who should be eligible to places in the Government and the Legislature. The actual appointments were to be made, however, not by the electors, but by the Executive. With the irrational multitude thus deprived of the power to bring back its old oppressors, priests, royalists, and nobles might safely do their worst. By way of still further precaution, Siéyès proposed that every Frenchman who had been elected to the Legislature since 1789 should be inscribed for ten years among the privileged five thousand. Such were the safeguards provided against a Bourbonist reaction. To guard against a recurrence of those evils which France had suffered from the precipitate votes of a single Assembly, Siéyès broke up the legislature into as many chambers as there are stages in the passing of a law. The first chamber, or Council of State, was to give shape to measures suggested by the Executive; a second chamber, known as the Tribunate, was to discuss the measures so framed, and ascertain the objections to which they were liable; the third chamber, known as the Legislative Body, was to decide in silence for or against the measures, after hearing an argument between representatives of the Council and of the Tribunate. As a last impregnable bulwark against Jacobins and Bourbonists alike, Siéyès created a Senate whose members should hold office for life, and be empowered to annul every law in which the Chambers might infringe upon the Constitution.