As already explained, the name Austria is used for convenience to designate those portions of the possessions of the house of Habsburg, which were not included by the settlement of 1867 among the lands of the Hungarian crown. The separation of Hungary made it necessary to determine the method by which these territories[13] were henceforth to be governed. It was the misfortune of the country that there was no clear legal basis on which new institutions could be erected. Each of the territories was a separate political unit with a separate history, and some of them had a historic claim to a large amount of self-government; in many the old feudal estates had survived till 1848. [Sidenote: The February Constitution.] Since that year the empire had been the subject of numerous experiments in government; by the last, which began in 1860, _Landtage_ or diets have been instituted in each of the territories on a nearly uniform system and with nearly identical powers, and by the constitution published in February 1861 (the February Constitution, as it is called), which is still the ultimate basis for the government, there was instituted a _Reichsrath_ or parliament for the whole empire; it consisted of a House of Lords (_Herrenhaus_), in which sat the archbishops and prince bishops, members of the imperial family, and other members appointed for life, besides some hereditary members, and a Chamber of Deputies. The members of the latter for each territory were not chosen by direct election, but by the diets. The diets themselves were elected for six years; they were chosen generally (there were slight local differences) in the following way: (a) a certain number of bishops and rectors of universities sat in virtue of their office; (b) the rest of the members were chosen by four electoral bodies or _curiae_,--(1) the owners of estates which before 1848 had enjoyed certain feudal privileges, the so-called great proprietors; (2) the chambers of commerce; (3) the towns; (4) the rural districts. In the two latter classes all had the suffrage who paid at least ten gulden in direct taxes. The districts were so arranged as to give the towns a very large representation in proportion to their populations. In Bohemia, _e.g._, the diet consisted of 241 members: of these five were _ex officio_ members; the feudal proprietors had seventy; the towns and chambers of commerce together had eighty-seven; the rural districts seventy-nine. The electors in the rural districts were 236,000, in the towns 93,000. This arrangement seems to have been deliberately made by Schmerling, so as to give greater power to the German inhabitants of the towns; the votes of the proprietors would, moreover, nearly always give the final decision to the court and the government, for the influence exercised by the government over the nobility would generally be strong enough to secure a majority in favour of the government policy.