One may wonder that the Communists with 441,995 votes received only two seats. This is explained by the fact, although they had put up tickets in all the districts they did not receive more than 60,000 votes, that is one seat, in any district other than Chemnitz. The votes that had been cast for them in the other districts and the excess of 60,000 received in Chemnitz were transferred to their ticket for the Reich. But there they could not receive more than one seat according to the provision that no ticket for the Reich may receive more seats than the number which the party in question has won in the districts directly.
Of the members elected 329 were elected directly in the electoral districts; 44 were elected in the district groups; 51 on the tickets of the Reich; 42 other members were sent by territories in which plebiscites had been ordered. These districts had not participated in the elections, and retained until the new system the representation they had received in the election for the National Assembly.
It must be noted finally, what could have been foreseen and what was aimed at by the law, that the number of votes not utilized is extremely small. The smallest fragment discarded was that of the People’s Party with 8,851 votes; then came the Independents with 9,872 votes; the Social Democrats with 11,457 votes, etc.
The cases in which a fragment of more than 30,000 votes became equivalent to 60,000 and therefore won seats were as follows: Democrats, German Nationals, Christian Federalists.
3.—DIRECT GOVERNMENT.
Universal suffrage is the means by which the sovereign people manifests its will in a democracy. Once the election is over it leaves to the representatives it has elected the freedom of directing in its name the affairs of the state. This is the system of representative government. At the same time the people give their representatives only limited powers, and they reserve the right themselves to decide on certain particularly important affairs. In such a case there is direct government. This system constitutes obviously an immediate application of the democratic idea; and it may be said that that Constitution is most democratic which avails itself most of direct government.
The National Assembly has admitted without any difficulty the principle of direct government into the Constitution. According to the expression of Preuss, direct government to-day is a “postulate of democracy”; to this the Social Democrat Quarck has added that direct government is “an essential element of democracy for which to-day there have been found positive, practical, and scientific forms, according to established principles of public law.”[30]
But in this form of government there is found not only a logical consequence of the principle of national sovereignty; there are also in it certain considerable advantages.
First, there is the educational value in the fact that the people participate directly in the conduct of public affairs. It is true it sometimes happens, in countries which have already applied this form of government that a decision of the people, far from constituting progress, actually marks if not retrogression, at least an arrest in the development of social legislation, or even in some matter of general policy. Nevertheless the very efforts that are made to convince the people and to bring them back to primary considerations, constitutes the best kind of civic teaching and gives them a political experience, the value of which in a democracy cannot be exaggerated. The collaboration of great strata of the population in the creation of laws and in political life profoundly educates the masses in the principles of their Constitution; and an institution which has been established in a country after bitter struggles, perhaps after several defeats, becomes thereafter almost impregnable, or cannot be discarded except with extreme difficulty.