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Updated: June 14, 2025
This is what explains their insistence upon separate electorates wherever the elective principle comes into play in the composition of representative bodies.
The Droop quota being one-sixth of the votes, the minority will secure two seats or 40 per cent. in those electorates where it is just over one-third, and one seat or 20 per cent. where it is just under. Since the mathematical chances are that it will be over in one half and under in the other half, it will, on the average, secure only 30 per cent., although entitled to 33 per cent.
I well recall the map of Germany I studied when a boy, a page blotched and seamed with bewildering spots of colour. The effort was to portray the position of some three hundred independent political units, duchies, principalities, bishoprics, free cities, and what not, among electorates and kingdoms of a larger sort, but still minute.
Three-seat electorates are, however, too small to secure accurate proportional representation; with parties evenly balanced, for instance, one must secure twice as much representation as the other. The following rules are given to explain the working of the system:
The Emperor Sigismund, who was often embarrassed financially by reason of his wars and journeyings had borrowed some four hundred thousand gold florins from Frederick, and it was in settlement of this debt that he mortgaged the territory of Brandenburg, and on the 8th of April, 1417, the ceremony of enfeoffment was performed at Constance, by which the House of Hohenzollern became possessed of this territory, and was thereafter included among the great electorates having a vote in the election of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
Officers quitted the armies, the nobility their chateaux, whole companies deserted to enlist on the frontiers. Distaffs were sent to those who wavered; and those who did not emigrate were threatened with the loss of the position when the nobility should return victorious. In the Austrian Low Countries and the bordering electorates, there was formed what was called La France exterieure.
But it was not relished by any government except that of the United States, and it was in order to enable the delegates to devise such a wording of the Covenant as would not bind them to an obnoxious principle or commit their electorates to any irksome sacrifice, that the peace treaty with Germany and the liquidation of the war were postponed.
They observed, that other dominions, electorates, and principalities in Germany, were secured by the constitutions of the empire, as well as by fair and equal alliances with their co-estates; whereas Hanover stood solitary, like a hunted deer avoided by the herd, and had no other shelter but that of shrinking under the extended shield of Great Britain: that the reluctance expressed by the German princes to undertake the defence of these dominions, flowed from a firm persuasion, founded on experience, that England would interpose as a principal, and not only draw her sword against the enemies of the electorate, but concentrate her chief strength in that object, and waste her treasures in purchasing their concurrence; that exclusive of an ample revenue drained from the sweat of the people, great part of which had been expended in continental efforts, the whole national debt incurred, since the accession of the late king, had been contracted in pursuance of measures totally foreign to the interest of these kingdoms: that, since Hanover was the favourite object, England would save money, and great quantities of British blood, by allowing France to take possession of the electorate, paying its ransom at the peace, and indemnifying the inhabitants for the damage they might sustain; an expedient that would be productive of another good consequence, it would rouse the German princes from their affected indifference, and oblige them to exert themselves with vigour, in order to avoid the detested neighbourhood of such an enterprising invader.
In the ecclesiastical states, including the electorates of Mentz, Treves, and Cologne, the prince-bishops and canons were nobles, who led a gay and luxurious life. Nowhere were poverty and wretchedness so general as in the lands of the knights.
It is in the workshops of actual experience alone that electorates will acquire the art of self-government, however highly educated they may be. "There must, I urge, be a devolution of definite powers on electorates. The officers of Government must give every possible help and advice to the new authorities, for which those authorities may ask.
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