s principaux
pays d'Europe et d'Amerique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1892),
I., 483-548; Hensel, Die stellung des
Reichskanzlers nach dem Staatsrechte des deutschen
Reiches, in Hirth, _Annalen des deutschen Reiches_,
1882; M. I. Tambaro, La transformation des pouvoirs
en Allemagne, in _Revue du Droit Public_,
July-Sept., 1910.]

III. THE BUNDESRATH

If the chancellorship is without a counterpart among modern
governments, no less so is the Federal Council, or Bundesrath. No
feature of the German political system is more extraordinary; none, as
one writer has observed, is more thoroughly native.[316] It is not an
"upper house," nor even, in the ordinary sense, a deliberative chamber
at all. On the contrary, it is the central institution of the whole
Imperial system, and as such it is possessed of a broad combination of
functions which are not only legislative, but administrative,
consultative, judicial, and diplomatic.

[Footnote 316: Lowell, Governments and Parties, I.,
259.]

*228. Composition: the Allotment of Votes.*--The Bundesrath is composed
of delegates appointed by the princes of the monarchical states and by
the senates of the free cities. In the Imperial constitution it is
required that the fifty-eight votes to which the twenty-five states
of the confederation are entitled shall be distributed in such a (p. 218)
manner that Prussia shall have seventeen, Bavaria six, Saxony four,
Wuerttemberg four, Baden three, Hesse three, Mecklenburg-Schwerin two,
Brunswick two, and the seventeen other states one apiece.[317] Save
for the increase of the Bavarian quota from four to six and of the
Prussian from four to seventeen, these numbers were simply carried
over from the Diet of the Confederation of 1815. The Prussian increase
arose, in 1866, from the absorption of Hanover, Hesse Cassel,
Holstein-Lauenburg, Nassau, and Frankfort; the Bavarian, from a
customs union treaty of July 8, 1867. Subsequent to the adoption of
the constitution of 1871 Prussia acquired, by contract, the vote of
the government of Waldeck; also, through the establishment in
1884-1885 of a perpetual Prussian regency in Brunswick, the two votes
to which that state is entitled; so that the total of the votes
controlled by the government of Prussia has been raised, for all
practical purpo