According to the Sieyès plan, there were to have been two consuls, of war and of peace respectively; and these consuls were to have named ministers to carry on the government through their appointees. Above the two consuls was to be placed a grand elector, who should be lodged in a palace, maintained in great state, magnificently salaried, but who should have no power beyond the choice of the consuls. If the Senate should be of the opinion, at any time, that the grand elector was not conducting himself properly, it could absorb him into its own body, and choose another. Sieyès had been one of the charter members of the revolutionary party, had helped to rock the cradle when the infant was newly born, had lived through all the changes of its growth, manhood, madness, and decline. Much of the permanent good work of the Revolution was his. He now wished to frame for the French such a fundamental law as would guard their future against the defects of their national character, while it preserved to them what was best in the great principles of the Revolution. Once a churchman himself, he knew the Church and dreaded it. He feared that the priests, working through superstitious fears upon the minds of ignorant masses, would finally educate them into hostility to the new order--train them to believe that the Old Régime had been the best, and should be restored. To get rid of this danger (the peril of royalists and priests from above acting upon the ignorant masses below), the far-sighted statesman, dealing with France as it was, did not favor popular sovereignty. Only by indirection were the masses to be allowed to choose their rulers. The people could choose the local notables from whom the local officers must be taken; and these local notables could vote for departmental notables from whom departmental officers should be chosen; and those departmental notables would select from their own numbers the national notables from whom holders for national positions must be taken. These electoral bodies grew smaller as they went upward. The 5,000,000 voters of the nation first elected 500,000 local notables; these chose from themselves 50,000 departmental electors; and these in turn took by vote 5000 of their own number to constitute the electoral class for national appointments. The executive filled all offices from these various groups. From below, the masses furnished the material to be used in governing; from above, the executive made its own selection from that material.