POPULAR SUFFRAGE 419 



These reforms are the organization of universal suffrage in the 

 highest degree by those factors calculated to palliate in a large 

 measure the greatest danger of popular contests; namely, the 

 triumph of the boisterous elements and the radical tendencies of an 

 active and audacious minority over the conservative feelings of a 

 majority calm, timid, or careless. 



Those three factors are plural suffrage, proportional representation, 

 and compulsory voting. 



I shall expound them briefly, without much detail, in order to 

 spare some time for the supplemental questions which may arise in 

 a discussion hereafter. 



Plural suffrage means the attribution to every voter of an in- 

 fluence, a voting power, corresponding as exactly as possible to the 

 value which every individual citizen represents for the political 

 organization of the community, under the system of universal 

 suffrage. 



Whereas the voter of twenty-five years of age has a single vote, 

 one supplementary vote is allotted to the head of a family at the age 

 of thirty-five, provided he has settled his family in a certain degree 

 of stability and comfort; a condition which appears when he pays 

 a small house-tax, instead of merely renting a furnished room. 



Another supplementary vote belongs to the owner of some property 

 either of real property worth $400 (2000 francs) or of registered 

 government bonds bringing an income of $20 (100 francs) a year. 

 The very nature of such property clearly enhances the character, at 

 the same time democratic and conservative, of that reform. 



Finally another plural suffrage, in the shape of two additional 

 votes, is granted to the holders of an academic degree and to the 

 voters who, without holding such degree, occupy a station in life 

 which implies that their education is equal to that which such degree 

 avers. 



Altogether, considering the voters as so many members of a general 

 meeting of the shareholders of the great national concern, one may 

 say that the Belgian suffrage law gives to each of them a voting 

 power equal either to the assets which every one owns in the busi- 

 ness, in his capacity of citizen, of family man, or of property 

 holder, or to the value of the services which he may render by the 

 enlightened vote of an educated man. 



But in the opinion of its authors, the electoral reform of 1893 

 in Belgium was to be just as democratic as it was conservative. It 

 coincided with a great extension of the suffrage, formerly strictly 

 limited, and it would have been unworthy of the Belgian statesmen 

 to take back on the one hand that which they were giving on the 

 other; that is, of infinitely increasing the influence of the upper 

 classes by drowning, as it were, the vote of the popular masses. 



