Another consequence is, that not only the Ministries are not homogeneous, which is the necessary consequence of the fact that no party has a majority in the Reichstag, but also they are heterogeneous in a fixed and invariable manner. To constitute a Cabinet there must be observed a triple rule. First, Ministers must be taken from the various political parties that enter the Cabinet; those individuals who are not members of the Reichstag being chosen from among the members of the party represented in the National Assembly. _Secondly, each party has the right to a number of Ministers proportional to the number of its members in the Reichstag._ The only exception to this rule is that the number of members in a Cabinet belonging to the same party must remain the same as in the just discarded Ministry; and if a Minister is withdrawn, the party to which he belongs designates his successor. If because of special circumstances another political group is called upon to fill the vacancy, this group in return as compensation to the other group cedes one of the ministerial seats held by it. Thirdly, the composition of a Ministry must remain unchanged for the whole session of the legislature. The first Ministry constituted after the meeting of the Constituent Assembly in February, 1919, consisted of Scheidemann, its President, eleven members as department chiefs and three Ministers without portfolio. The parties that assumed government in coalition were, the Social Democrats, who had 163 members in the Assembly, the Democrats with 74 members, and the Centre with 89. The Social Democrats had exactly as many as the other two groups combined. In the Cabinet of fourteen members, therefore, they had seven seats, among them that of the President. The other seats were distributed, four to the Democrats and three to the Centre. During the entire period of the Constituent Assembly--with the exception of three months of the Summer of 1919, when the Democrats, who did not want to sign the treaty of peace, remained voluntarily aloof--the Ministry and the Ministers could change, but the composition of the Ministry rested practically identical. The last Cabinet formed under this Assembly, that of Hermann Müller, comprised at the time of its constitution, March, 1920, eleven Ministers, of whom one was without portfolio. And it was understood that it would later be completed by the addition of three other Ministers then not yet designated. Among the eleven members at first, there were five Social Democrats, three Democrats and three members of the Centre. As for the first Ministry constituted after the elections of 1920, that consisted of five members of the Centre, among them Fehrenbach, three members of the People’s Party and two Democrats; which corresponded approximately to the respective strengths of the groups in the Reichstag, viz., 68, 62, 45 members.[45]