At the summit, a committee of twelve members, similar to the former royal council, exercises collective royalty; nominally, authority is divided amongst the twelve; it is, in practice, concentrated in a few hands. Several members occupy only a subaltern position, and amongst these, Barère, who, official secretary and mouthpiece, is always ready to make a speech or draft an editorial; others, with special functions, Jean Bon St. André, Lindet, and above all, Prieur de la Côte d'Or and Carnot, confine themselves each to his particular department, navy, war, supplies, with blank signatures, for which they give in return their signatures to the political leaders; the latter, called "the statesmen," Robespierre, Couthon, Saint-Just, Collot d'Herbois, Billaud-Varennes, are the real rulers providing overall direction. It is true that their mandate has to be renewed monthly; but this is a certainty, for, in the present state of the Convention, its vote, required beforehand, becomes an almost vain formality. More submissive than the parliament of Louis XIV., the Convention adopts, without discussion, the decrees which the Committee of Public Safety present to it ready made. It is no more than a registry-office, and scarcely that, for it has relinquished its right of appointing its own committees, that office being assigned to the Committee of Public Safety; it votes as a whole all lists of names which the Committee send in.[11119] Naturally, none but the creatures of the latter and the faithful are inscribed; thus, the whole legislative and parliamentary power belongs to it.--As to executive and administrative power, the ministers have become mere clerks of the Committee of Public Safety; "they come every day at specified hours to receive its orders and acts;[11120] "they submit to it "the list with explanations, of all the agents" sent into the departments and abroad; they refer to it every minute detail; they are its scribes, merely its puppets, so insignificant that they finally lose their title, and for the "Commission on External Relations" a former school-master is taken, an inept clubbist, bar-fly and the pillar of the billiard-room, scarcely able to read the documents brought to him to sign in the café where he passes his days.[11121]--Thus is the second power in the State converted by the Committee into a squad of domestics, while the foremost one is converted into an audience of claqueurs.