Cologne, April 28. The rumour already current in the town at 
midday today was confirmed this evening: the King and his 
martial-law Government have dissolved the Second Chamber.?” 

The details can be found below, de dato Berlin.* 

By this act the King and his martial-law Ministers have once again 
broken their word. According to the imposed martial-law Charter of 
December 5,?”' the Chambers were expressly convened “to revise the 
Constitution”. Only after the first Parliament convened under this 
Constitution had revised this botchwork was the latter to be regarded 
as complete and definitively valid. This is how it was imposed in 
December of last year. 

Hence the Chambers had at least a partially constitutional mandate. 
So long as they had not carried out this mandate, so long as they 
together with the Crown had not revised the Constitution, they could 
not be dissolved, any more than the Assembly of blessed memory 
convened to agree upon the Prussian Constitution.?” 

Nevertheless it has been dispersed—this miserable Second 
Chamber, summoned under the sabre dictatorship and the menace 
of the bayonet, by means of bribery, intimidation and deception! 

This is what is called “Prussian honour”, “Prussian loyalty”! 

If the Ministers had waited a few more weeks, perhaps the 
Austro-Hungarian revolution would have spared them the trouble 
and dispersed both Chambers. 

As for the significance of this new coup d'état, it is quite obvious. 
We are going to be made to experience the rule of the sabre raised 
in the same issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.— Ed. 

to the second power. We shall have most graciously foisted on us 
laws on the press, on associations, on civil disturbances, on posters 
etc., to such an extent that the German philistine’s eyes will fill with 
tears. There will be persecution, disciplinary punishment, arrests; 
the state of siege will be made universal and, to cap it all, finally a new 
Constitution will be introduced, and an electoral law with property 
qualifications as well as a House of Lords, a Constitution in which the 
present first Chamber will figure as the second. 

In short, things will be pushed as far as Prussian pluck will permit. 

We, for our part, wish only that Herr Manteuffel will once more 
convene the United Diet?’ of blessed memory.