A last and decisive objection, conclude the democrats, against the system of a vocational parliament is that it replaces or annihilates the democratic Chamber elected by the equal suffrage of all, that is to say, by democracy itself, and substitutes for it a professional chamber elected by a plural vote of privileged persons. Let the proposal be remembered which the Prussian conservatives submitted two months before the Revolution of 1918 to effect, as they claimed, the equality of the right to suffrage. Each elector was to have one vote within his professional vocational group; but the representation contemplated by this proposition was that the group of farmers were to have one seat for every 12,295 electors, whereas their labourers would not get more than one seat for every 110,530, a landed proprietor having electoral power ten times as strong as that of an agricultural labourer, six times as strong as that of a factory worker and one-and-a-half times as strong as that of a civil servant. It is true that the division of mandates in a Chamber of Labour would not result in as anti-democratic consequences as these; but the project of this chamber is based on the essential principle of parity between employers and workers; the two are supposed to be rigorously equal in numbers. That would be self-evident and understandable fully if the two groups had to settle questions in which their reciprocal interests were opposed, or if it were a question purely technical, where the number of delegates does not enter into consideration. But it is absolutely impossible to admit that an assembly thus constituted should take decisions or vote resolutions; for, _a numerically equal representation both of employers and employés would correspond obviously to a proportion of electors much greater for one class than for the other_. In any industry, for example, an employer represents considerably fewer electors than a worker, and to give his voice in the direction of public affairs an influence equal to that of a worker, would be, from the point of view of democracy, an absurdity. One thing or the other. Either the seats in the Vocational Parliament are apportioned among the professions according to the number of electors in each, the representatives being elected in each vocation by the equal suffrage of all without distinction between employer and employé--in which case there would result a duplication of the political parliament of which the least one can say is that there is no apparent utility in it. Or, the number of seats attributed to each profession must be measured by the economic or social importance of that profession, basing representation in each profession on the principle of parity--in which case there would result a parliament of the privileged, condemned by the democratic ideal. An assembly thus composed could very well draw up reports and give advice on questions in which it possesses special competence.