The King in his address to the council said that at his accession he had wanted to travel through all the provinces desolated by the late civil wars, in order to hear the complaints of his subjects and to remedy conditions in the best manner possible; that it was for this cause that he had convoked the assembly and so enjoined them, in virtue of the royal authority, to apply themselves diligently to affairs. Then the chancellor spoke: after dwelling upon the general evils of the state, he asserted that the root of all the evils was the bad administration of justice; that the King had become convinced of this in the course of the tour of the provinces; that for himself he could not refrain from calling things by their right name and from speaking as he thought; that those who were appointed to administer justice were guilty of great excesses; that these evils had increased owing to the impunity and the license which obtained. I do not deny [he added] that there are too many laws and ordinances in France and that the multitude of the laws and the number of the judges is the cause of much unnecessary and tyrannical litigation. But it is no less true that when new evils arise there is a necessity of new remedies, and that when the ancient laws have been abrogated either by inobservance or by license, it is necessary to make new ones in order to cure current evils and to arrest the course of public calamity. The public welfare requires new legislation. If the new laws are not observed, on account of the venality and avarice of the ministers of justice, they must be punished severely and these public pests who fatten upon the blood of a miserable people must be driven from office. Superfluous offices, moreover, must be abolished and the ruinous multiplication of legal causes stopped. The justice of the last charge was particularly manifest. Since the time of Francis I it had been the practice of the crown to sell offices and even to create them for purposes of revenue only. The chancellor further asserted that the King could not suffer those who had not the right to make laws to attribute to themselves the power to interpret them; he proposed to diminish the excessive number of the courts, and raised the question whether the demands of justice would not be better met if the Parlement ceased to be so sedentary and became ambulatory instead—a suggestion which, it is interesting to observe, found a partial realization in the seventeenth century in the establishment of the Grands Jours d’Auvergne. He insinuated that it was advisable to subject the judges to censure and to compel them to render account of the manner in which they exercised their office, and that it might be better to establish judges for two or three years than to permit the holding of office in perpetuity.