who paid a certain land tax, varying in the several provinces from 50
to 250 florins ($20 to $100), and including women and corporations;
(2) the cities, in which the franchise was extended to all males of
twenty-four who paid a direct tax of ten gulden annually; (3) chambers
of commerce and of industry; and (4) rural communes, in which the
qualifications for voting were the same as in the cities. To each of
these curiae, or classes, the law of 1873 assigned a number of
parliamentary representatives, to be elected thereafter in each
province directly by the voters of the respective classes, rather than
indirectly through the diets. The number of voters in each class and
the relative importance of the individual voter varied enormously. In
1890, in the class of landowners there was one deputy to every 63
voters; in the chambers of commerce, one to every 27; in the cities,
one to every 2,918; and in the rural districts, one to every
11,600.[666]

[Footnote 666: Hazen, Europe since 1815, 399.]

*519. The Taaffe Electoral Bill of 1893.*--During the period covered by
the ministry of Count Taaffe (February, 1879, to October, 1893) there
was growing demand, especially on the part of the Socialists, Young
Czechs, German Nationalists, and other radical groups, for a new
electoral law, and during the years 1893-1896 this issue quite
overshadowed all others. In October, 1893, Taaffe brought forward a
sweeping electoral measure which, if it had become law, would have
transferred the bulk of political power to the working classes, at the
same time reducing to impotence the preponderant German Liberal party.
The measure did not provide for the general, equal, and direct
suffrage for which the radicals were clamoring, and by which the
number of voters would have been increased from 1,700,000 to
5,500,000. But it did contemplate the increase of the electorate to
something like 4,000,000. This it proposed to accomplish by abolishing
all property qualifications of voters in the cities and rural
communes[667] and by extending the voting privilege to all adult males
who were able to read and write and who had resided in their electoral
district a minimum of six months. To avoid the danger of an excess of
democracy Taaffe planned to retain intact the curiae of landed
proprietors and chambers of commerce, so that it would still be (p. 468)
true that 5,402 large landholders would be represented in the lower
house by 8