olutions. Any minister may be impeached
by either house.[675]

[Footnote 674: Issued under warrant of the
much-controverted Section 14. See p. 461.]

[Footnote 675: Law of December 21, 1867, concerning
Imperial Representation, Sec. 21. Dodd, Modern
Constitutions, I., 83. A work of value is G.
Kolmer, Parlament und Verfassung in Oesterreich
(Vienna, 1909).]

IV. POLITICAL PARTIES

*526. Racial Elements in the Empire.*--The key to the politics of
Austria is afforded by the racial composition of the Empire's
population. In our own day there is a tendency, in consequence of the
spread of socialism and of other radical programmes which leap across
racial and provincial lines, toward the rise of Austrian parties which
shall be essentially inter-racial in their constituencies. Yet at the
elections of 1907--the first held under the new electoral law--of the
twenty-six party affiliations which succeeded in obtaining at least
one parliamentary seat all save possibly two comprised either
homogeneous racial groups or factions of such groups. Fundamentally,
the racial question in Austria has always been that of German _versus_
non-German. The original Austria was preponderantly German; the
wealthiest, the best educated, the most widespread of the racial (p. 475)
elements in the Empire to-day is the German; and by the Germans it has
regularly been assumed that Austria is, and ought to be, essentially a
German country.[676] In this assumption the non-German populations of
the Empire have at no time acquiesced; and while they have never been
able to combine long or effectively against the dominating Germanic
element, they have sought persistently, each in its own way, to compel
a fuller recognition of their several interests and rights.

[Footnote 676: Lowell, Governments and Parties,
II., 95.]

The nationalities represented within the Empire fall broadly into
three great groups: the German, the Slavic, and the Latin. In an
aggregate population of 26,107,304 in 1900 the Germans numbered
9,171,614, or somewhat more than 35 per cent; the Slavs, 15,690,000,
or somewhat more than 60 per cent; and the Latins, 958,065, or
approximately 3.7 per cent. The Germans, comprising the most numerous
of the individual nationalities, occupy exclusively Upper Austria,
Salsb