under the influence of
Metternich, as an organ for the suppression of Liberal opinion. In the
North German Confederation (1867-1870) a new departure was made, which
has been followed in the constitution of the present German empire. Two
bodies were instituted--a _Bundesrat_, which resembles the old diet in
being a congress of envoys sent by the sovereigns of the different
states of the confederation, and a _Reichstag_, which bears the name of
the old diet, but differs entirely in composition. The new Reichstag is
a popular representative assembly, based on wide suffrage and elected by
ballot; and, above all, it is an assembly representing, not the several
states, but the whole Empire, which is divided for this purpose into
electoral districts. Both as a popular assembly, and as an assembly
which represents the whole of a united Germany, the new Reichstag goes
back, one may almost say, beyond the diet even of the middle ages, to
the days of the old Teutonic folk-moot.

See R. Schroder, _Lehrbuch der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte_ (1902), pp.
149, 508, 820, 880. Schroder gives a bibliography of monographs
bearing on the history of the medieval diet. (E. BR.)

DIETARY, in a general sense, a system or course of diet, in the sense of
food; more particularly, such an allowance and regulation of food as
that supplied to workhouses, the army and navy, prisons, &c. Lowest in
the scale of such dietaries comes what is termed "bare existence" diet,
administered to certain classes of the community who have a claim on
their fellow-countrymen that their lives and health shall be preserved
_in statu quo_, but nothing further. This applies particularly to the
members of a temporarily famine-stricken community. Before the days of
prison reform, too, the dietary scale of many prisons was to a certain
extent penal, in that the food supplied to prisoners was barely
sufficient for existence. Nowadays more humane principles apply; there
is no longer the obvious injustice of applying the same scale of
quantity and quality to all prisoners under varying circumstances of
constitution and surroundings, and whether serving long or short periods
of imprisonment.

The system of dietary in force in the local and convict prisons of
England and Wales is that recommended by the Home Office on the advice
of a departmental committee. As to the local prison dietary, its
application is based on (1) the principle of variation of diet w