The Eastern Front(40)

Abstractly, their position held quite a bit of merit. But Wilhelm V and Amalie Elizabeth thought that was pure folly. In the real world, sensible people—for sure, sensible rulers—had to accept that certain realities, no matter how unpleasant, were too well-established to try to overturn.

Unfortunately, their practical and moderate position was not shared by most of their party. The majority of Crown Loyalists insisted that the decision on who was and who wasn't a citizen had to be made in each province by that province's traditional and established authorities, not the newly elected, bastard legislatures.

Looked at from one angle, this stance was more than a bit absurd. After all, the Crown Loyalists held state power in the USE because they'd won a majority of the seats in the existing parliament, be that parliament ever so distorted and basely-born.

But that was only true nationally. The majority of the Crown Loyalists were adamant that "proper" citizenship criteria had to be established in every province as well. Left to their own devices, Magdeburg province and the State of Thuringia-Franconia would implement the Fourth of July Party's definition of citizenship. That would give those two very prominent provinces—the SoTF was already the USE's most populous province—even more sway in national affairs. That would be inevitable, since the voter rolls of most other provinces would drop drastically after the provincial elites reestablished traditional citizenship criteria.

Without realizing it, the down-time Crown Loyalists were being sucked into the same quicksand that had trapped the slave-owners in the early up-time United States. The free states—or full-citizenship provinces, in the case of the USE—would inevitably wind up with more voters than the slave states. Or, in this case, more voters than those provinces which sharply limited citizenship.

Amalie Elizabeth and her husband were far more familiar with up-time history than most Crown Loyalists. The landgrave had once suggested at a national gathering of Crown Loyalist leaders, quite sarcastically, that perhaps the Crown Loyalists should demand that all non-citizens in limited-citizenship provinces should be considered 3/5 of a person for the purpose of determining the size of the electorate.

The reference had passed right over the heads of most people present, of course. But it didn't matter. The proposal that was actually adopted by that gathering and then accepted by most Crown Loyalists went beyond Hesse-Kassel's satire: They argued that all non-citizens in a limited-citizenship province should be counted as citizens for the purpose of determining the electoral strength of that province.

That position, needless to say, infuriated the CoCs and the members of the Fourth of July Party. As one wag put it, "Why not simplify things and have just one citizen in every province who exercises all of the votes of the rest of the people who live in the province? What a novel idea! Maybe we could call it ‘tyranny.' "

But the traditional elites who provided most of the leadership of the Crown Loyalists ignored the criticisms. For them, steeped in paternalistic traditions and customs, the idea seemed perfectly reasonable. Of course all people who live in a province should have their existence reflected in the electoral strength of that province. The decisions made by their legislatures would affect them, would they not? But likewise, of course most of those people shouldn't actually be allowed to vote. They weren't competent to do so. You might as well give children in a family the same authority as the parents.

Wilhelm V and Amalie Elizabeth were firmly convinced the end result of forcing limited citizenship on every province would be a civil war. They were not at all sure who would wind up winning that war. But even if they'd been confident their side would win, they didn't think the enormous destruction was a price worth paying.

The landgrave of Hesse-Kassel said so again today, to the prime minister who now had the power to make the decision. And the response was the one he and his wife had feared. A man, trapped in quicksand, who insisted that he was just going for a swim.

"In the long run, we don't have any choice," Wettin said. His tone was mulish, his gaze was downcast. He reminded Amalie of a petulant child. "If we let them set the terms of citizenship, we'll wind up with a civil war for sure. The only way to prevent that is to limit their power from the outset."

Amalie Elizabeth could no longer restrain herself. "Wilhelm, that's wrong from more angles than I can count! Just to begin with, it's absurd to think that you can limit the power of the Committees of Correspondence—not to mention someone like Mike Stearns!—by simply fiddling with the voter rolls. It didn't work in the United States that Grantville came from, did it? What makes you think it will work here?"