suchungen ueber das Wahlpruefungsrecht
des deutschen Reichstags (Leipzig, 1908). There is
a full discussion of German methods of legislation
in Laband, _op. cit._, Secs. 54-59.]

III. THE RISE OF POLITICAL PARTIES (p. 229)

In Germany, as in continental countries generally, the number of
political groups is legion. Many are too small and unstable to be
entitled properly to the designation of parties; and, in truth, of
even the larger ones none has ever become so formidable numerically as
to acquire a majority in the popular chamber. For the enactment of
measures the Government is obliged to rely always upon some sort of
coalition, or, at best, upon the members of a group which for the time
being holds the balance between two opposing alignments.

*243. Conservatives and Progressives.*--The party situation of the
present day has been reached in consequence of the gradual
disintegration of the two great political groups with which Prussia
entered upon the period of Bismarck's ministry; and to this day the
parties of the German Empire and those of the Prussian kingdom are
largely identical.[342] The two original Prussian groups were the
Conservatives and the Fortschritt, or Progressives, of which the one
comprised, throughout the middle portion of the nineteenth century,
the supporters of the Government and the other its opponents. The
Conservatives were pre-eminently the party of the landed aristocracy
of northern and eastern Germany. During twenty years prior to 1867
they dominated completely the Prussian court and army. Following the
Austrian war of 1866, however, the Conservative ascendancy was broken
and there set in that long process of party dissolution by which
German political life has been brought to its present confused
condition. To begin with, each of the two original parties broke into
two distinct groups. From the Conservatives sprang the Frei
Conservativen, or Free Conservatives; from the Fortschritt, the
National-Liberal-Partei, or National Liberals. In the one case the new
group comprised the more advanced element of the old one; in the
other, the more moderate; so that, in the order of radicalism, the
parties of the decade following 1866 were the Conservatives, the Free
Conservatives, the National Liberals, and the Fortschrittspartei, or
Radicals. Among these four groups Bismarck was able to win for his
policy o