the people were violated. In November 1923 Scheidemann admitted in a newspaper article in the that the course he had followed a year earlier, which had led to the end of Joseph Wirth's (Centre Party) second government, had been a grave and irreparable mistake. At that time, in deference to the former USPD members who had just returned to the mother party, they had refused any cooperation with the right-liberal German People's Party (DVP), which had ultimately brought the non-partisan Wilhelm Cuno, who was close to the DVP, into the government as Reich chancellor. In April 1921 Scheidemann called on Reich President Friedrich Ebert to resign because his office compelled him to use his Social Democratic name in support of the center-right minority government formed after the MSPD withdrew following its loss of 62 seats in the 1920 election. Scheidemann's call had been preceded by many expressions of displeasure from within the party against Ebert because he had not resisted the request of Centre Party Chancellor Constantin Fehrenbach's center-right government to invoke Emergency Article 48 of the Reich Constitution. It had allowed the government to bypass parliament and impose restrictions on the right to strike (November 1920) and to introduce special courts to suppress the communist-led March Action uprising (1921) in central Germany. Scheidemann's call had been immediately preceded by the adoption, approved by Ebert, of the flag ordinance introduced by the Fehrenbach government. It used symbols of the empire to a far greater extent than had originally been provided for in the constitution and could therefore be understood as a signal directed against the Republic. Ebert did not heed Scheidemann's request to resign. During his tenure in the Reichstag, Scheidemann wrote political treatises that were widely read and in parliament made several speeches that had significant consequences. After the Kapp Putsch in 1920, he sharply attacked his party colleague Gustav Noske in the National Assembly, which had fled to Stuttgart due to the putsch, although he did not explicitly mention his name. Scheidemann held the Reichswehr minister partly responsible for the coup attempt, saying that the democratization of the military had been neglected. He demanded a thorough purge of the troops, the disarmament of all mutineers, and the dismissal of all officers who were not loyal to the republic. Noske was eventually forced to resign. In 1926 Scheidemann revealed in the Reichstag the illegal collaboration between the Reichswehr and