Ten years earlier General Bonaparte had declared that what the French wanted was glory and the gratification of their vanity; of liberty, he said, they knew nothing. The Emperor Napoleon, in one of his spoken musings, applied the same conception to all continental Europeans, saying that there were everywhere a few men who knew what freedom was and longed to secure it; but that the masses needed paternal guidance, and enjoyed it as long as they were comfortable. The asylum of this enlightened minority in France was for a time the tribunate; to many it seemed that, if free government be government by discussion, in the tribunate alone was any semblance of freedom left; its name had consequently retained a halo of nobility, and its mere existence was a comfort to the few who still recalled the ideals of the Revolution. But, in truth, the body itself had ceased to have any dignity whatsoever. The system of legislation was briefly this: from the throne came a message exposing the situation of the country, the council of state then formulated the measures set forth as necessary, the tribunate approved them in one or other of its sections, and the legislature gave the enacting vote. The suppression of the tribunate, therefore, appeared to the general public like final proceedings in bankruptcy. Some of the members went into the legislature, some into official administrative positions, and the right of discussion in committee behind closed doors was transferred to certain sections of the legislature. By way of compensation it was "decreed by the senate," as the formality was called, that no man could thenceforth sit in the legislature until he had reached the age of forty. Perhaps Napoleon remembered that his own fiery ambition had made him emperor before he was thirty-six. The measure was announced to the tribunes as a mere matter of course, and created no stir at the time. In later years it was recalled that the English Parliament under the Plantagenets had never entirely perished, and so was ready for powerful deeds in more propitious days. But in France's later crisis the French tribunate could not be revived; with it disappeared forever the last rallying-point for the scattered remnant still true to the Revolution.