The Assembly in addition considered itself bound to study and pass laws of a character not necessarily constitutional but urgently needed by the Reich. In the front rank in importance were the laws designed to create the financial resources of which the Reich had great need in order to meet the enormous charges imposed upon it by the treaty of peace, the losses of five years of war and the increased public expenditure. It was also urgent to enact laws governing pensions and indemnities to the wounded, the mutilated, and the widows of the war, etc. But from the moment the Constitution entered into force on August 11, Germany was under a new constitutional régime. It was no longer the régime of the Provisional Constitution of February 10, 1919; that Constitution was abolished by the definitive one. Nor had it as yet entered on the complete régime of the definitive Constitution; for that provided for a Reichstag, and no one would dream of calling a Reichstag to sit at the same time as the National Assembly. It was a transitional régime; from August 12, 1919, to June 6, 1920, the Constitution of August 11 was in force but the National Assembly performed the function of the Reichstag, and the President of the Reich, elected by the National Assembly, remained in office until the people should elect his successor (Article 180 of the Constitution). In conformity with this decision on August 21, 1919, President of the Reich, Ebert, took the oath of allegiance to the new Constitution before the National Assembly in the course of its last session at Weimar. From September 30 on, the Assembly sat in Berlin in the palace of the Reichstag, where it discussed and passed important financial legislation, which included “a law on the income tax”; another “on a consumption tax on liquors”; and still others dealing with “factory councils and with the relief of public distress throughout the Reich.” In the early part of March, 1920, the parties of the Right, who hoped by means of new elections to obtain considerable increase in strength, submitted a proposal in which the Reich was asked to make known at once what projects for laws it expected to submit to the Assembly before its dissolution; and demanding that the Assembly submit as soon as possible proposals regulating the elections to the Reichstag, the election of the President, on initiative and referendum; and in addition proposing that the Assembly declare itself dissolved on May 1, 1920. This motion was defeated on March 10 after the Minister of Interior, Koch, had indicated the laws which still remained to be enacted. He insisted on the necessity of a profound study of the project of the law governing the election of the Reichstag; and that the first Reichstag of the Republic should not be elected according to the provisions of a temporary and little studied law. He declared that the National Assembly could not be dissolved nor the elections held before the autumn of 1920.