assembly; he was not satisfied with creating an artificial Upper House which might, perhaps, be able for one year or two to check the extravagances of a popular House, or with allowing to the King a veto which could only be exercised with fear and trembling.  Generally the Lower House is the predominant partner; it governs; the Upper House can only amend, criticise, moderate.  Bismarck completely reversed the situation:  the true government, the full authority in the State was given to the Council; the Parliament had to content itself with a limited opportunity for criticism, with the power to amend or veto Bills, and to refuse its assent to new taxes.  In England the government rests in the House of Commons; in Germany it is in the 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