Elections were held in Austria a few months after the passage of the law which introduced equal and universal male suffrage, and the character and disposition of the elected Reichsrath, which met in June, 1907, afforded indications of some remarkable effects from the extension and equalizing of the franchise. It was expected, of course, to popularize the Reichsrath, and break the domination of the upper classes in that body; but, according to reports, it has done much more. Prior to 1896, the members of the Abgeordncten or lower house of the Reichsrath, then numbering 353, were all divided into four sections, elected by four classes of people, as follows: 85 elected by the owners of large landed estates, 22 by chambers of commerce and manufactures; 115 by town taxpayers assessed for five florins of annual tax, and by doctors of universities; 131 by country taxpayers assessed for five florins yearly. In that year the membership was enlarged by an addition of 72, who were to be representatives of the whole people, elected by universal male suffrage, while the old classified representation remained as before. The new law has swept away the whole system of a classified representation, and the representative house is now leveled to one footing, as a body of deputies from the people at large. The most conspicuous effect of this in the elections appears to have been a sudden break of the power which the German element in the much-mixed population of the Austrian dominion has been able to exercise hitherto. Hence, it must be the fact that the Germans hold far more than their proportion of the property which the old system represented, and derived from that, formerly, a weight in the Reichsrath which their numbers cannot give them on the equalized vote. {39} Altogether, in the various Cisleithan states—the two Austrias proper, Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, Silesia, Salzburg, Tyrol, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Istria, Dalmatia—they form a little more than one third of the total population, the other two thirds being mainly Slavonic, in many divisions, principally Czech, Polish, and Slovene. Ten years ago the Austrian Reichsrath was offering a spectacle of factious disorder so violent that it drew the attention of the world, and was made entertaining as well as interesting by Mark Twain, then a resident for some months at Vienna and writing descriptions of the scenes of tumult that went on before his eyes. See in Volume VI. of this work AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1897 (OCTOBER-DECEMBER).