always founded on the fact that their city is the Imperial residence, a claim of supremacy for the German race to which they belong.
These evil influences prevailed. Count Goluchowski retired from office and was replaced by Baron Schmerling, an Austrian bureaucrat of the ancient school. Baron Schmerling believed, as most men of his class did, and still do, that a strong central administration directed from Vienna by German officials was the form of government most suitable to the polyglot state. Strongly German in his sympathies, he also in view of the foreign policy of the empire considered it necessary that its subjects should, at least to the foreign observer, appear as Germans; thus only could the Austrian hegemony in Germany, which was represented by the presidency of the federal council at Frankfurt, be preserved. A certain amount of constitutional government Schmerling, after the disasters in Lombardy, considered a necessary evil. As the result of these considerations Schmerling published the decree of February 26, 1851, many of whose enactments are still in force. A central parliament, representing the whole empire and consisting of two houses, was to meet at Vienna. The different parts of the empire were granted representative bodies, to whom very limited powers were assigned, though they were entitled to choose from their number the members of the central parliament. Faithful to his system of maintaining and even extending the influence of the German element, Schmerling established a system of election which—particularly in Bohemia—was outrageously unfair. Some of the deputies of the Bohemian country districts represented 2500, others 25000 electors; and it was always the German deputy who represented the smaller and the Bohemian who represented the larger number of votes. There is in all the records of parliamentary representation no worse case of gerrymandering than that which we find in Schmerling's electoral law for Bohemia. When the Bohemian Diet met at Prague in 1861 the assembly consisting almost entirely of Germans appeared rather as a travesty than as a representation of the opinions of the nation. One of the first duties of the Bohemian Diet was to elect representatives to the central parliament at Vienna. The nationalist members took part in this election—an action for which they have been frequently blamed.
