“I take the liberty most humbly to submit the following statement of the origin and significance of this Order. Under the absolute Monarchy the office of a President of the Ministry of State was not required; and it was in 1847, in the United Diet, that the Liberal members of that time (Mevissen) first pointed to the necessity of paving the way for constitutional arrangements by the appointment of a ‘Prime Minister’ (‘Premier Minister’), whose task it should be to take charge of and provide for the maintenance of a uniform policy by the responsible Ministry, and to undertake responsibility for the entire results of the policy of the Cabinet. This constitutional arrangement came into force with us in 1848, and the ‘President of the Ministry of State,’--in succession Count Arnim, Camphausen, Count Brandenburg, Baron von Manteuffel, and the Prince of Hohenzollern,--was responsible in the first place not for any single department, but for the entire policy of the Cabinet, and, therefore, for the departments, as a whole. Most of these gentlemen had no separate department but only the Presidency, as for instance, prior to my entrance into office, the Prince of Hohenzollern, Minister von Auerswald and Prince von Hohenlohe. It was their duty, however, to maintain that unity and continuity in the Ministry of State itself and in the relations between the latter and the monarchy without which Ministerial responsibility, such as arises under a constitutional system, would be an impossibility. The relations of the Ministry of State and its individual members to their newly instituted Minister President, however, soon required to be regulated in more strict accordance with the Constitution. This was done, in concurrence with the Ministry of State, in the Order of the 8th of September, 1852. Since that time this Order had governed the relations of the Minister President to the Ministry of State, and through it alone the Minister President was invested with the authority which enabled him to assume that degree of responsibility for the policy of the Cabinet as a whole which was attributed to him in the Diet and by public opinion. If each individual Minister can receive commands from the Sovereign without previous arrangement with his colleagues, a coherent policy in the Cabinet, for which some one is to be responsible, is an impossibility. It would be impossible for any of the Ministers, and especially for the Minister President, to bear the constitutional responsibility for the Cabinet as a whole. Such a provision as that contained in the Order of 1852 could be dispensed with under the absolute monarchy, and could also be dispensed with to-day if we returned to absolutism without Ministerial responsibility. But according to the constitutional arrangements now legally in force, the control of the Cabinet by a President under the Order of 1852 is indispensable. All my colleagues agree with me upon this point, as is shown by yesterday’s