e Federal Council, and for the same
reason--that the Council has both executive and legislative power.
Constitutions have generally been made by men whose chief object was to
weaken the power of the Government, who believed that those rulers do
least harm who have least power, with whom suspicion is the first of
political virtues, and who would condemn to permanent inefficiency the
institutions they have invented. It was not likely Bismarck would do
this. The ordinary device is to separate the legislative and executive
power; to set up two rival and equal authorities which may check and
neutralise each other. Bismarck, deserting all the principles of the
books, united all the powers of government in the Council. The whole
administration was subjected to it; all laws were introduced in it. The
debates were secret; it was an assembly of the ablest statesmen in
Germany; the decisions at which it arrived were laid in their complete
form before the Reichstag. It was a substitute for a Second Chamber, but
it was also a Council of State; it united the duties of the Privy
Council and the House of Lords; it reminds us in its composition of the
American Senate, but it would be a Senate in which the President of the
Republic presided.

Bismarck never ceased to maintain the importance of the Federal Council;
he always looked on it as the key to the whole new Constitution. Shortly
after the war with France, when the Liberals made an attempt to
overthrow its authority, he warned them not to do so.

"I believe," he said, "that the Federal Council has a great
future. Great as Prussia is, we have been able to learn much from
the small, even from the smallest member of it; they on their
side have learnt much from us. From my own experience I can say
that I have made considerable advance in my political education
by taking part in the sittings of the Council and by the life
which comes from the friction of five and twenty German centres
with one another. I beg you do not interfere with the Council. I
consider it a kind of Palladium for our future, a great guarantee
for the future of Germany in its present form."

Now, from the peculiar character of the Council arose a very noticeable
omission; just as there was no Upper House (though the Prussian
Conservatives strongly desired to see one), so, also, there was no
Federal Ministry. In every modern State there is a Council formed of the
heads of different administrativ