tly by the Federal Council, with appeal, as a rule, to
the Assembly.[623]

[Footnote 622: Art. 102. Dodd, Modern
Constitutions, II., 282-284; Dupriez, Les
Ministres, II., 218-225.]

[Footnote 623: Art. 113. Dodd, Modern
Constitutions, II., 286. The nature and functions
of the Swiss executive are treated briefly in
Vincent, Government in Switzerland, Chap. 17, and
Adams and Cunningham, The Swiss Confederation,
Chap. 4. An excellent account is that in Dupriez,
Les Ministres, II., 182-246. Of value are Blumer
and Morel, Handbuch des schweizerischen
Bundesstaatsrechts, III., 34-92, and Dubs, Le droit
public de la confederation suisse, II., 77-105.]

II. LEGISLATION: THE FEDERAL ASSEMBLY

With specific reservation of the sovereign rights of the people and of
the cantons, the constitution vests the exercise of the supreme
authority of the Confederation in the Bundesversammlung, or Federal
Assembly. Unlike the cantonal legislatures, the Federal Assembly
consists of two houses--a Nationalrath, or National Council, and a
Staenderath, or Council of the States.[624] The one comprises
essentially a house of representatives; the other, a senate. The
adoption, in the constitution of 1848, of the hitherto untried
bicameral principle came about as a compromise between conflicting
demands of the same sort that were voiced in the Philadelphia
convention of 1787--the demand, that is, of the smaller federated
units for an equality of political power and that of the larger ones
for a proportioning of such power to population.

[Footnote 624: In French, the Conseil National and
the Conseil des Etats.]

*471. The National Council: Composition and Organization.*--The National
Council is composed of deputies chosen at a general election, for a
term of three years, by direct manhood suffrage. The constitution
stipulates that there shall be one representative for every 20,000
inhabitants, or major fraction thereof, and a reapportionment is made
consequent upon each decennial census. The electoral districts are so
laid out that no one comprises portions of different cantons; but they
are of varying sizes and are entitled to unequal numbers of
representatives