bill to reform the three-class electoral system, but the reform of the universally unpopular electoral law failed to pass into law because the left uncompromisingly demanded its replacement by the Reichstag electoral law. That went too far for both the more centrist liberal and the conservative forces, which were fully willing to see reform. They called for plural suffrage, which was favored by intellectuals such as John Stuart Mill and Otto Hintze. Immediately after the fighting in World War I ended and the German Revolution of 1918–1919 had brought down the Hohenzollern monarchy, the Council of the People's Deputies, Germany's interim governing body, on 12 November 1918 proclaimed universal democratic suffrage. This abolished the three-class franchise in Prussia and simultaneously introduced women's suffrage throughout Germany. Historical assessment In recent times, the Prussian three-class franchise has received a more lenient assessment than in previous decades. It has, for example, been noted that both John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Toqueville viewed the system favorably. When it was introduced, three-class suffrage was considered somewhat on the progressive side because its rolls were based not on land ownership but on taxes and because it was "universal," that is, because in principle every male was allowed to vote. For that reason it was strongly condemned by conservatives. A general, equal, secret, and direct suffrage for men, such as applied to elections to the Reichstag, was in 1914 enjoyed by only two of the 25 federal states, Baden and Württemberg, and by the imperial territory Alsace-Lorraine, which Germany had taken from France in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. In other countries such as Great Britain, Sweden, or the Netherlands, many men were not allowed to vote until World War I due to e.g. property requirements, while in Prussia every adult male had a vote even if for most it was lightly weighted. Universal male suffrage existed outside Germany only in Switzerland and France before the turn of the century. In Sweden, for example, only 8.2 percent of the total population was allowed to vote around 1900. Prussian electoral law was less democratic than in most other German states because of the lack of secrecy. In all other states except Waldeck, elections were considered secret after Bavaria introduced secret ballots in 1881, Braunschweig in 1899, Hesse in 1911 and Schwarzburg-Sondershausen in 1912. The secret ballot, however, often existed only on paper. Indirect voting, on the other