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and in passing various important bills. But they soon ran upon
a sunken rock, which had once proved fatal to the Sverdrup
ministry.
By a royal resolution of the 13th April, 1835, it had been
ordained that the Norwegian minister of state (in Stockholm), or if
he should be prevented, another member of the Norwegian council,
should be present when Norwegian, or Norwegian and Swedish
diplomatic matters were brought forward by the minister for foreign
affairs. Unassuring and unsatisfactory though this arrangement
was, it remained in force for 50 years.
By a change made in the Swedish constitution in 1885, the
ministerial council in which diplomatic matters were brought
forward, came to consist of the Swedish minister for foreign affairs
and two other ministers, and of the Norwegian minister of state or
his deputy. In order to remedy this glaring disproportion, the
king proposed to determine the composition of the council by an
additional article in the Act of Union. The representatives of the
Norwegian council in Stockholm, Richter and Jacob Sverdrup,
proposed that three members of the cabinet of each kingdom should
have seats in the ministerial council, and that this decision ought
to be embodied both in the Act of Union and in the constitution
of both kingdoms. The Swedish council agreed to this, but it
assumed in its declaration, that the minister for foreign affairs must
continue as before to be Swedish. With reference to the
proposition of the representatives, the king thereupon resolved in the
Norwegian council, that the Norwegian government should submit
proposals for a constitutional provision that in diplomatic affairs
the king should «come to a decision after having heard the
representatives of the Norwegian council who are present.»
During the debate to which the communication of the royal
injunction on the 9th June, 1885, gave rise in the Storthing,
Sverdrup let fall a remark which was taken to mean that Norway
should embody the provision concerning the ministerial council in
her fundamental law, whether the Swedes would embody it in the
Act of Union or not. The Swedish government then conceived the
suspicion that the Norwegians wanted to go their own way, and
they demanded that the law to be passed should use the
expressions that had been approved of previously in the composite council.
In consequence of this, the matter was put on one side, but during
its discussion in the Storthing of 1886, the majority, at the
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