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resentative system is beginning to be generally appreciated, and particularly in commercial towns. The deputies of this department are to be changed the approaching autumn, and the minds of men are already anxiously bent upon selecting such representatives as may best understand and promote their local interests. Few acts of the Bourbon government have contributed more powerfully to promote the popularity of the King, than the law enacted in the course of last year, which abolished the double election, and enabled the voters to give their suffrages directly for their favorite candidate, thus putting a stop at once to a variety of unfair influence, previously exerted upon such occasions. The same law has also created a general interest upon the subject, never before known; the strongest proof of which is, that, of the six or eight thousand electors contained in this department, nearly the whole are expected now to vote, whereas not a third ever did so before. The qualifications for an elector and a deputy are uniform throughout the kingdom, and depending upon few requisites; nothing more being required in the former case, than the payment of three hundred francs per annum, in direct taxes, and the having attained the age of thirty; while an addition of ten years to the age, and the payment of one thousand francs, instead of three hundred, renders every individual qualified to be of the number of the elected. The system, however, is subject to a restriction, which provides, that at least one half of the representatives of each department shall be chosen from among those who reside in it. In the beginning of the revolution, a much wider door was open: all that was then necessary to entitle a man to vote, was, that he should be twenty-one years of age, a Frenchman, and one who had lived for a year in the country on his own revenue, or on the produce of his labor, and was not in a state of servitude. It was then also decreed, that the electors should have each three livres a day during their mission, and should be allowed at the rate of one livre a league, for the distance from their usual place of residence, to that in which the election of members for their department is held. Such were the only conditions requisite for eligibility, either as elector or deputy; except, indeed, that the citizens in the primary assemblies, and the electors in the electoral assembly, swore that they would maintain liberty and equality, or di
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