This was a magnificent programme; unfortunately it was difficult to carry it out and the most severe criticisms were rightly, it seems, made against the manner in which it was carried out.
When the articles relating to the fundamental rights and duties were being drawn up, the members of the National Assembly of necessity remained party men, and were guided, even when they voted on philosophico-legal questions, by party considerations. Also some of these “fundamental rights” had the appearance of being simply extracts from programmes or brochures of political parties. On the other hand, the members who drew them up naturally put in the foreground the problems which, at the time of the discussions, were the burning questions in both Parliament and in public opinion. The result is that the second part of the Constitution regulates questions of the day rather than of the future, and issues prescriptions for circumstances more than it proclaims fundamental rights.
However, all this would have been admissible, if there had been one big party that could have without constraint and without difficulty incorporated its own principles in the Constitution; or even if there had been two or more parties with fairly similar conceptions, which were able to agree on fundamental rights. There would have been at least a Declaration of Rights that might have corresponded to the conceptions of the majority. But there was no such majority in the National Assembly. To be sure, there was an impressive majority that agreed on a democratic Constitution. But on questions of schools, church, the family, and of economic and agrarian reforms--questions that had to be dealt with in the statement of fundamental rights--there was in the National Assembly and in the parties of the majority such divergence of opinion that it was impossible to construct of it any logical or coherent edifice. Also, in reading each provision of the fundamental rights, one can guess which party has furnished the first part of a phrase and which the second. When, for example, referring to property one reads, “The right of property is guaranteed by the Constitution. Its nature and limits are defined by law”; or, when in Article 152 a phrase declares, “There is an economic liberty in the measure indicated by the law,” every one, no matter what may be his personal conceptions, may find himself entirely satisfied, according to whether the first or the last words of each provision are emphasized. This evident compromise between the political parties on political conceptions so widely divergent was emphatically pointed out by Member of the Assembly Koch, who characterized the fundamental rights as “an interfractional political programme.”[48]