These statements are undoubtedly exaggerations in two respects. One fact meanwhile must be noted of importance here. While the government was discussing with the unions the formation of the ministry the newspapers printed vehement protests from vocational associations and from other labour unions and groups of clerks and civil servants, which demanded that they, too, be allowed to participate in the negotiations. For they did not understand why the labour unions should alone have the privilege of participating, for example, in the choice of Ministers--and it is impossible from the democratic point of view to deny the force of their position. Without deducing from these facts any premature conclusions one may ask if the supporters of an Economic Parliament are not right in saying that formal democracy no longer is able to meet the actual needs of the people. The events of the months, March-April, 1920, demonstrated, they say, the complete incapacity of political powers to surmount any difficulty as soon as it becomes in the least serious. One of them wrote, “The political party is about to become a superfluous organization; it is being ousted or perhaps absorbed by the vocational association.”[25] A new epoch demands new political forms. It is true that it is inadmissible for a certain class of unions to arrogate to itself the right to impose its wishes on a government of the whole people. We must not think, on the other hand, that in the future the unions would renounce the use of means which have hitherto proved to be powerful. There is only one remedy open: to associate the other productive parties of the nation with the political work of the unions; to transform this present irregular and irresponsible political work, such as it is now, into a constitutional collaboration with the government of the state. It is there that the events of the month of March have demonstrated the necessity of changing the present system. These events appear thereby one of the steps which lead from a formal democracy to a real democracy, from a purely political parliamentarism of the past to a politico-economic parliamentarism of the future. SECTION II APPLICATIONS The democratic principle is one of the bases on which the Constitution of August 11 is constructed; more or less immediate applications of it are found in most of the institutions provided for by this Constitution. We shall confine ourselves here to the study of the principal and most direct of these applications. 1.--THE REPUBLIC.