The house of representatives is made up of persons elected for the term of four years from the electoral districts in accordance with the law of election, which was originally promulgated simultaneously with the Constitution in 1889 and was revised in 1900. The revised law provided that the electoral district should be coextensive with the administrative division, city, or prefecture, and defined the number of members to be elected from each district. Under the earlier arrangement the city or prefecture had been divided into smaller districts, each of which returned one, sometimes two, members. The new larger districts were calculated to do away with some of the evils of sectionalism which had previously been unavoidable. The revised law also separated a certain number of cities from rural districts, to which some of the former had hitherto been connected to form single districts, the change signifying the intention of the law to give the urban population a freer voice in the house than was possible under the old system. The aggregate number of the representatives was also materially increased from 300 to 369, the cities claiming 61 members, instead of less than twenty, as heretofore. Another important feature of the law was the voting by ballot and the provision that each elector should vote for only one candidate, irrespective of the number of members returnable from the same district. The obvious intention was to protect the rights of the elector from the abuses of the political party, whose orderly and organized action was also indirectly encouraged by this measure, and to give a chance to the minorities to be represented. Again, while the property qualifications of the voter and the candidate had been measured by the payment of direct taxes of not less than ten yen by the former and fifteen yen by the latter, the amount was now reduced to ten yen for the elector and altogether removed from the eligible person. The numbers of the electors in the country accordingly rose from some 460,000 to about 800,000. It is curious to note that the original bill of the revised election law introduced by the government was considerably more liberal than the amended and finally passed articles of the lower house. Thus it would appear that the representatives of the people showed themselves reluctant to accept the premium offered by the government whose conservatism they had been wont to attack, but the real situation will be understood only when we come to study in the next section the political maneuvers of the period. We may simply note here in passing that 800,000 electors among the population of more than 46,000,000 cannot be considered adequate, even when allowance is made for the still comparatively untrained political condition of the people. Although an agitation for an enlarged electorate has not yet assumed a definite form, there can be little doubt that progress will be made in this respect in a not distant future.