Reichstag has little more than a veto power, and the people are hampered in the expression of even that veto privilege by the in the electoral diviions of the empire. The election law originally provided that there should be one member of the Reichstag for, generally speaking, every 100,000 inhabitants, but did not provide for fair readjustment in case of increasing or shifting population. Since that law was passed, the population has increased from 40,000,000 to 58,000,000, but there has been no rearrangement of electoral divisions. There is one member of the Reichstag who represents 183,076 votes, and another who represents only 9,551.
August Bebel, a prominent and influential German Socialist.
The increase in population has been in the cities, and it is from the cities that the Social Democrats draw their main strength. The unfairness and inequality of the present electoral arrangement, therefore, falls with greatest force upon the Social Democrats, and reacts to the greatest advantage of the agrarians and clericals. Those groups, forming, as they do, the Government majority, and being the beneficiaries of the present inequalities in the electoral distribution, are unwilling to concede the slightest change. They dread the ascendancy of the Social Democrats as some great national calamity, and they offer their fears as their excuse for manifest unfairness.
Although the Social Democrats polled 3,010,000 votes, or 32 per cent. of the total, they have only 81 seats in the Reichstag, which is composed of 397 members. The Centre, with a popular vote of 1,850,000, has 100 seats in the Reichstag. If there had been fair representation and an equal distribution of political rights the Social Democrats would have 125 members and would have been the strongest group in the Chamber. Berlin has 6 members of the Reichstag, but on a fair plan of distribution would have 20.
The unfairness of the electoral distribution in the empire is even more marked in some of the states of which the empire is formed. In the Prussian Diet there is, for example, not only the same inequalities in the size of the constituencies, but there is a unique plutocratic system of voting by class according to the amount of taxes paid. The city of Berlin now has 9 members in the Diet, but would have, on an equitable basis of population, 25. The system of voting by class is peculiar, and must strike those of us who love political equality as most unfortunate. The system is this: In each election precinct the voters are divided into three equal classes, on a basis of the amount of taxes paid. These electors form a little electoral college, choosing the member or members of the Diet. Here is a specific illustration of how this system works out: In a certain district in Berlin, which includes a part of the Wilhelmstrasse, the first class has in it 3 voters, the second class 8, and the third class 294. The ballots of the three voters in the first class thus have the same political weight as the ballots of the 294 in the third class, because the first class pays the same amount of taxes as the third class. But the particularly amusing feature here is that this third class of 294 includes Count von Bülow and other Cabinet ministers, and many high Government officials.
Under this system there is not only inequality of political rights within a district, based on the tax contribution of the voter,
