t
9.5 per cent to the second, and the remaining 87.5 to the third. In
the individual precinct, as in the nation at large, the little group
at the top, however, possesses precisely as much political weight as
the large group at the bottom, because it is entitled to choose an
equal number of Wahlmaenner. The result is a segregation of classes
which, whatever its merits at certain points, is of very questionable
utility as a basis of government.

The effect politically is to give an enormous advantage to the
conservative and agrarian interests and to deprive the socialists and
other popular elements all but completely of representation. At the
elections of 1903 the Social Democrats put forth effort for the first
time in an organized way to win seats in the Landtag. Under the system
which has been described a total of 324,157 Conservative votes
sufficed to elect 143 representatives, but 314,149 Social Democratic
votes did not secure the return of a single member. In the Imperial
elections of the same year, conducted under a scheme of equal
suffrage, the popular party sent to the Reichstag eighty members. At
the Prussian elections of 1908 a Social Democratic vote which
comprised approximately twenty-four per cent of the total popular vote
yielded but seven members in a total of 443. So glaringly undemocratic
is the prevailing system that even that arch-aristocrat, Bismarck, was
upon one occasion moved to denounce the three-class arrangement as
"the most miserable and absurd election law that has ever been
formulated in any country."[384]

[Footnote 384: For a brief exposition of the
practical effects of the system, especially on
political parties, see Lowell, Governments and
Parties, I., 305-308. The system as it operates in
the cities is described in Munro, The Government of
European Cities, 128-135, and in R. C. Brooks, The
Three-Class System in Prussian Cities, in
_Municipal Affairs_, II., 396ff. Among special
treatises may be mentioned H. Nezard, L'Evolution
du suffrage universel en Prusse et dans l'Empire
allemand (Paris, 1905); I. Jastrow, Das
Dreiklassensystem (Berlin, 1894); R. von Gneist,
Die nationale Rechtsidee von den Staenden und das
preussische Dr