disorders in the city, and the more radical deputies
further inflamed public feeling by persisting in the discussion of the
abolition of the nobility, and of a variety of other more or less
impracticable and revolutionary projects. The king took offense
because the assembly presumed to exercise constituent functions
independently and, after compelling a removal of the sittings to the
neighboring city of Brandenburg, he in disgust dissolved the body,
December 5, and promulgated of his own right the constitutional
charter which he had drawn.

[Footnote 363: See p. 198.]

[Footnote 364: Known technically as Versammlung zur
Vereinbarung der preussischen Verfassung.]

*267. Formation of the Constitution.*--At an earlier date it had been
promised that the constitution to be established should be "agreed
upon with an assembly of the nation's representatives freely chosen
and invested with full powers;" but it had been suggested to the king
that the way out of the existing difficulty lay in issuing a
constitutional instrument independently and subsequently allowing the
Landtag first elected under it to submit it to a legislative revision,
and this was the course of procedure which was adopted.[365] Elections
were held and, February 26, 1849, the chambers were assembled. Having
recognized formally the instrument of December 5, 1848, as the law of
the land, the two bodies addressed themselves forthwith to the task of
revising it. The result was disagreement and, in the end, the
dissolution of the lower house. The constitution of 1848 had been
accompanied by an electoral law establishing voting by secret ballot
and conferring upon all male citizens equal suffrage. Upon the
dissolution of 1849 there was promulgated by the king a thoroughgoing
modification of this democratic measure, whereby voting by ballot was
abolished and parliamentary electors were divided into three classes
whose voting power was determined by property qualifications or by (p. 251)
official and professional status. In other words, there was introduced
that peculiar three-class system which was already not unknown in the
Prussian municipalities, and which, in both national and city
elections, persists throughout the kingdom to the present day. In the
elections which were held in the summer of 1849 in accordance with
this system the democrats refused to participate. The upshot was that
the new chambers