The Daily News. FRIDAY, MARCH 4. THE PRUSSIAN FRANCHISE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 331, 5 March 1910, Page 4

The Daily News. FRIDAY, MARCH 4. THE PRUSSIAN FRANCHISE.

Tho rise of the Socialist party, and the widening of the political horizon of the people, in Germany is making itself .felt in its insistent demand for the granting of greater political freedom in Jiome affairs. The cables have recently given particulars of great Socialist demonstrations which have ended in serious conflicts with the police. The powers of repression, however, cannot for long deny to a. people their demands for the franchise. The Prussian franchise is one of the most complicated, antiquated and unjust in Europe, and it was scarcely to be expected that the modern educated German should be satisfied with «, measure of participation in the affairs of the country which even the electors of Turkey would not now tolerate. But, as an exchange points out, it is the glaring contrast between

the Imperial franchise on which the Reichstag is elected and the franchise which controls the election of the Lower House in the leading State of the Empire that has made the question rankle in the Ibreasts of the Prussian Liberals. For the Reichstag manhood suffrage prevails as the result of a piece of political engineering in which Bismarck sacrificed his convictions and his prejudices on the point in order to secure anotner object by which he had set store. But the manhood of Prussia ■is denied the same power over its own Parliament that it is allowed to exercise over the Parliament of the Empire. It is a property franchise which determines the elections to the Prussian Diet, and a property franchise acting in an indirect and absurdly artificial fashion. The voter does not elect a member of the Diet, but only a member of an electoral college, to which the ultimate responsibility of selection is entrusted. •There are three classes of voters, divided according to the amount of direct taxation which they pay. Those who pay the highest amounts constitute the highest class, whose aggregate contribution to {Tie revenue is one-third 01 the total raised byllirect taxation. The second class is composed of taxpayers who individually pay a smaller amount in taxation, but together contribute another third of the whole. The general body of taxpayers whose contributions are foo small to find them a, pine in either of the other two classes, constitute the third class of voters. The poorest and largest class thus possesses only half the political power entrusted to the classes above it, and only the same amount as the wealthy men who. on the score of their wealth, are endowed with one-third of the whole of the so-called popular power available under the Constitution. The position of hopeless insubordination in which the Prussian democracy tfius finds itself i= aggravated hv the necessity of open voting, as well as by the contrast with the universality 01 the Imperial franchise already referred to. How the open voting works was illustrated a few weeUs ago bv the steps taken against a number of small, officials in Prussian Poland, "who in spite of an official warning, voted for the Polish candidates in the recent municipal elections." Questioned on the subject in the Diet, the Minister-President declared that the Polish movement was a danger to the Empire and that ''the duty of the Government was to see that officials who were not prepared to cooperate in carrying out Prussia's general Polish policy were transferred to other posts." As the same officials and thousands still lower in the social scale can vote, and vote secretlv and securely, at an election for the Reichstag. th* l excesses to which popular indignation is running in Prussia are hardly to be wondered at.