Ernest Barker

“ The new Reichstag is a popular representative assembly, based on wide suffrage and elected by ballot; and, above all, it is an assembly representing, not the several states, but the whole Empire, which is divided for this purpose into electoral districts. Both as a popular assembly, and as an assembly which represents the whole of a united Germany, the new Reichstag goes back, one may almost say, beyond the diet even of the middle ages, to the days of the old Teutonic folk-moot. ”

“ Under the Carolingians it was usual to combine the assembly of magnates with the generalis conventus of the “field of May,” and it was in this inner assembly, rather than in the general body (whose approval was merely formal, and confined to matters momentous enough to be referred to a general vote) , that the centre of power really lay. It is from the assembly of magnates that the diet of medieval Germany springs. The general assembly became meaningless and unnecessary, as the feudal array gradually superseded the old levy en masse, in which each freeman had been liable to service ”

“ By the 14th century, therefore, the originally homogeneous diet of princes is already, at any rate practically if not yet in legal form, divided into three colleges—the electors, the princes and nobles, and the representatives of the towns (though, as we shall see, the latter can hardly be reckoned as regular members until the century of the Reformation) . Under the Hohenstaufen it is still the rule that every member of the diet must attend personally, or lose his vote ”