The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 3/New Czechoslovak Legislation

New Czechoslovak Legislation

EVERY VILLAGE TO HAVE LIBRARY.

Food for the body is none too plentiful in the Czechoslovak Republic, but food for the mind will now be free to everyone. The National Assembly has just passed a law making it the duty of every city, town and village to establish a public library with educational books and works of fiction. Every library will have a circulating division, a reference division and a reading room with periodicals. Every village, where there is a public school, must have the library in use within one year from the date of the law; smaller villages have two years’ time. Maintenance of the library is a charge upon the municipal or village budget. The council will elect a library board consisting of four to eight members, and this board will select the librarian. In villages the schoolmaster will ordinarilly act as librarian; in cities with population of 10,000 or more a professional librarian must be employed. The ministry of education and culture will have supervision over the carrying out of this law.

Available statistics show that in 1910 there were in Bohemia alone 4451 public libraries; of that number 3885 were Czech and the rest German; slightly over a half of smaller villages did not have a public library. In addition to the public libraries there were in operation also 2139 society and lodge libraries. All these libraries loaned out for home use 2,678,000 books in 1910, that is just about one book to every three Bohemians.

The Czechoslovaks have always made an excellent showing in literacy and education. The first university in Central Europe was founded in Prague in 1348. In the middle of the fifteenth century knowledge of reading and writing was general even among the common people. Today there are practically no illiterates among the Czechs, and generous appropriations for educational purposes are approved by all parties.

ELECTION LAW DEBATED.

Czechoslovak National Assembly will have to take up in the fall consideration of election laws to govern the choice of the future constitutional and legislative assembly. The present legislature was born of the revolution; it was not elected by the people, but nominated by the various poli tical parties and represents only the Czechoslovaks; the German and Magyar minorities have had no part in the government of the republic so far.

While everyone in Prague agrees that elections should not be held, until the Czechoslovak soldiers from Siberia are brought home, the government in its draft of the election laws, laid before the Assembly on July 23, evidently figures on speedy return of this army, for it is proposed to hold the first general elections in December, the exact date to be set by the government.

The right to vote is accorded to every man and woman who is 21 years of age and has lived three months in the city or village, where he or she proposes to vote. Every voter must take an oath of loyalty to the Czechoslovak Republic. Candidates for parliament must be 30 years of age and must have lived three years in one of the municipalities of the republic. Of course women are fully eligible. Compulsory voting and acceptance of parliamentary election is provided by the government bill. Deputies, are elected for a term of five years.

The most startling difference between the American elections consists in the fact that proposed Czechoslovak elections and the in America the citizen votes for men, in Czechoslovakia for parties. The whole country is divided into large districts, electing from 12 to 43 deputies. In each district each party nominates a full set of candidates; parties are rather plentiful in the Czechoslovak Republic, the Czechs having quite a few and the Germans even more. The elector must cast his vote for the entire party ticket without privilege of scratching any name. Each village constitutes a voting precinct, with several polling places in the cities. Results are transmitted to the official election headquarters of each district and the total number of votes cast is divided by the number of candidates to be elected from the district. If, for instance, the National Democrats cast 125,000 votes in the Prague districts out of a total of 430,000, the quotient would be 10,000, there being 43 places to be filled in the Prague district; thus the National Democrats would elect 12 candidates. Out of the 43 names on the National Democratic ticket the first 12 would be declared elected. The remaining fraction of 5000 votes would be combined with similar fractions from other districts by a central election commission, and this commission would assign to the parties one or more places, so that even a very small party with votes scattered throughout the republic would get representation in parliament, if it received altogether one three hundreth part of the total vote cast, the number of deputies being 300.

While this plan might not commend itself to America, it suits conditions in Czechoslovakia, where there are many parties and several nationalities all claiming parliamentary representation. By this plan the German minority will have just the strength in parliament to which its numbers entitle it; so will the small Magyar minorities in Slovakia be given opportunity to elect their own deputies, and even the Jews, should they decide to run Jewish nationalist candidates.

A somewhat similar system of proportinal representation has been employed at the recent municipal elections in Czechoslovakia and has been found satisfactory. It is expected that the government franchise bill will soon be enacted into law in substantially the form in which it was submitted to the National Assembly.

Czechoslovak Information Bureau.