electoral participation, seen by him as a meritocracy that discriminated between active citizens and purely governed ones. The Convention supplanted the firman of January 1857 in matters of electoral legislation, operating some major changes, all of them having a conservative bias, and cutting the electoral corps back to some 2,000 voters, less than half of whom voted directly. The five classes of both Principalities were replaced with two, of rural and urban voters, subdivided into groups which elected directly or indirectly; the voting age was lowered to 25, and the minimum property requirement was set as 100 ducats. Each county dispatched 3 rural deputies, of whom 2 were directly elected; cities and towns voted 1 deputy each, except for Bucharest, which had 3, Craiova and Ploiești, which sent 2. Candidates, who had to be aged 30 and possess 400 ducats to their name, could be elected in several constituencies at once, but were required to settle for only one. In the rural constituencies, all those under 1,000 ducats could only vote indirectly—prompting members of the National Party to donate some of their land to landless colleagues, in a bid to increase their relative voting power; that threshold was set at 6,000 ducats in the cities, but property as defined for that class could include many forms of capital assets. Extreme discrepancies resulting from these requirements included Muscel County, which now had only 7 qualified direct voters in the rural constituencies, while its capital town, Câmpulung, produced 17 voters of all categories. In nearby Pitești, there were only 8 voters in all. In Moldavia, the same rules created an infamous paradox at Ismail, where there was only one qualified voter, Vladimir Stoica. According to the Swiss traveler Johann Fridolin Herzog, Caimacam Ghica survived for the rest of his term as a "powerless plaything" of the boyardom, his executive power rendered null by their "petty intrigues". The political spectrum was again dividing itself, with moderates such as Costaforu and Boerescu declaring themselves placated by the Convention, while radicals such as Brătianu openly embraced the concept of an "independent Romania". Despite its anti-revolutionary bias, the new electoral law again produced a victory for the unionist camps, when it came to voting in the Hospodar. In Moldavia, the Elective Assembly was voted in in December 1858, and unanimously selected deputy Alexandru Ioan Cuza for the throne. In Wallachia, conservative unionism took hold with the