ry members, and a
Chamber of Deputies. The members of the latter for each territory were not
chosen by direct election, but by the diets. The diets themselves were
elected for six years; they were chosen generally (there were slight local
differences) in the following way: (a) a certain number of bishops and
rectors of universities sat in virtue of their office; (b) the rest of the
members were chosen by four electoral bodies or _curiae_,--(1) the owners
of estates which before 1848 had enjoyed certain feudal privileges, the
so-called great proprietors; (2) the chambers of commerce; (3) the towns;
(4) the rural districts. In the two latter classes all had the suffrage who
paid at least ten gulden in direct taxes. The districts were so arranged as
to give the towns a very large representation in proportion to their
populations. In Bohemia, _e.g._, the diet consisted of 241 members: of
these five were _ex officio_ members; the feudal proprietors had seventy;
the towns and chambers of commerce together had eighty-seven; the rural
districts seventy-nine. The electors in the rural districts were 236,000,
in the towns 93,000. This arrangement seems to have been deliberately made
by Schmerling, so as to give greater power to the German inhabitants of the
towns; the votes of the proprietors would, moreover, nearly always give the
final decision to the court and the government, for the influence exercised
by the government over the nobility would generally be strong enough to
secure a majority in favour of the government policy.

This constitution had failed; territories so different in size, history and
circumstances were not contented with similar institutions, and a form of
self-government which satisfied Lower Austria and Salzburg did not satisfy
Galicia and Bohemia. The Czechs of Bohemia, like the Magyars, had refused
to recognize the common parliament on the ground that it violated the
historic rights of the Bohemian as of the Hungarian crown, and in 1865 the
constitution of 1861 had been superseded, while the territorial diets
remained. In 1867 it was necessary once more to summon, in some form or
another, a common parliament for the whole of Austria, by which the
settlement with Hungary could be ratified.

[Sidenote: Centralists and Federalists.]

This necessity brought to a decisive issue the struggle between the parties
of the Centralists and Federalists. The latter claimed that the new
constitution must be made by ag