"Junker" is a contemptuous term for the land-owning nobility.
[42] Translator's note.
In the United States, the poll tax is an indirect property qualification, as it strikes those who, through lack of employment, sickness or invalidity, are unable to spare the amount, however small, of this tax. Furthermore, the laws requiring a continuous residence in the precinct, the town, the county, and the State as a qualification for voters have the effect of disqualifying a great number of workingmen who are forced to change their abode according to their opportunities for employment. And the educational qualifications which especially the Southern States are rigidly enforcing tend to disfranchise the great mass of the negroes, who form the main body of the working class in those States.
[43] Translator's note.
In Belgium, where the proletariat is now on the verge of gaining political supremacy, the battle cry is: "S. U. et R. P." (Suffrage Universelle et Representation Proportionelle).
[44] Translator's note.
Suffrage in Germany, though universal for men is by no means equal, but founded on property qualifications. In Prussia, e. g., a three class system of voting is in force which is best illustrated by the following figures: In 1898 there were 6,447,253 voters; 3.26 per cent belonged to the first class, 11.51 per cent to the second class, and 85.35 per cent to the third class. But the 947,218 voters of the first and second classes had twice as many votes as the five and a half millions of the third class.
[45] Author's note.
Lassalle's "System of Acquired Rights" argues in its second part mainly the proposition that the Roman testament is as old as Rome itself, and that there has never been in Roman history "a time without a testament." According to him, the testament had its origin in pre-Roman times in the cult of the departed. Lassalle, as a convinced Hegelian of the old school, derives the provisions of the Roman law, not from the social condition of the Romans, but from the "speculative conception" of will, and thus arrives at this totally anti-historic conclusion. This is not to be wondered at in a book that draws from the same speculative conception the conclusion that the transfer of property was purely a side issue in Roman inheritance. Lassalle not only believed in the illusions of Roman jurists, especially of the earlier ones, but he outstripped their fancy.
[46] Author's note.