The new constitution has stood the test. The number of states of which the empire consists has remained unaltered;[3] occasional disputes have been settled harmoniously in a legal manner. The special rights reserved to Bavaria and Württemberg have not proved, as was feared, a danger to the stability of the empire. Much apprehension had been caused by the establishment of a permanent committee for foreign affairs in the Bundesrat, over which the Bavarian representative was to preside; but the clause remained a dead letter. There is no record that the committee ever met until July 1900, when it was summoned to consider the situation in China; and on that occasion it probably formed a useful support to the government, and helped to still apprehension lest a too adventurous policy should be pursued. Another clause determined that in a division in the Reichstag on any law which did not concern the whole empire, the representatives of those states which were not concerned should not vote. This, had it been retained, would have destroyed the coherence of the Reichstag as representative of the whole nation. It was repealed in 1873. The permission to maintain diplomatic missions has been equally harmless: most of the states have recalled all their diplomatic representatives; Saxony, Bavaria and Württemberg have maintained only those at Vienna, the Vatican and at St Petersburg. Bavaria has even voluntarily adopted many imperial laws from which it was legally exempted; for instance, the laws of settlement. Prussia and the empire.