Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/38

 franchise, is applied by the law in a direct and open, or in some covert manner. The effect is always the same.

Thus the second French Republic in the year 1850 could not possibly recall openly the universal and direct right to the suffrage which had been once declared, and which we shall consider presently in its operation. But they partially effected their object by excluding from the franchise, by the law of 31st May, 1850, all citizens who had not been domiciled for at least three years without intermission in the same place. For, as workmen in France are often forced by their circumstances to change their abode, and to seek for employment in another commune, they hoped, and with good reason, to exclude from the suffrage a very considerable number of working men, who would be unable to prove a continuous residence of three years in the same place.

We have here, then, a Census in a disguised form.

Much worse, however, do we fare in Prussia since the passing of the electoral law, which divided electors into three classes. By this law, according to the circumstances of different localities, three, ten, or thirty or more electors of the third class who have no property, exercise only the same voting power as a single large capitalist, a rich burgher who belongs to the first electoral class. Consequently, in point of fact, if the proportional numbers were on an average, for instance, as one to ten, nine men in every ten of those who in the year 1848 possessed the franchise, have lost it through this electoral law which formed part of the charter of the year 1849, and now exercise it only in appearance.