Note (Back) — Chapter X

228. Composition: the Allotment of Votes.—The Bundesrath is composed of delegates appointed by the princes of the monarchical states and by the senates of the free cities. In the Imperial constitution it is required that the fifty-eight votes to which the twenty-five states of the confederation are entitled shall be distributed in such a manner that Prussia shall have seventeen, Bavaria six, Saxony four, Württemberg four, Baden three, Hesse three, Mecklenburg-Schwerin two, Brunswick two, and the seventeen other states one apiece.[317] Save for the increase of the Bavarian quota from four to six and of the Prussian from four to seventeen, these numbers were simply carried over from the Diet of the Confederation of 1815. The Prussian increase arose, in 1866, from the absorption of Hanover, Hesse Cassel, Holstein-Lauenburg, Nassau, and Frankfort; the Bavarian, from a customs union treaty of July 8, 1867. Subsequent to the adoption of the constitution of 1871 Prussia acquired, by contract, the vote of the government of Waldeck; also, through the establishment in 1884-1885 of a perpetual Prussian regency in Brunswick, the two votes to which that state is entitled; so that the total of the votes controlled by the government of Prussia has been raised, for all practical purposes, to twenty.