The law-making department in any sovereign state is the repository of most power; consequently the constitution of Switzerland, like that of the United States, after enumerating the powers which shall be exercised by authority of the general government, confers them in terms upon the most immediate representative of the sovereignty. In Switzerland this is the Federal Assembly; in the United States it is Congress. The scope of powers conferred upon the Swiss Federal Assembly enables it to exercise not only legislative, but supervisory, executive, and judicial functions. The separation of its powers from those of the Federal Council and the Federal Tribunal--the executive and judicial departments--is neither clearly set forth nor in practice is it strictly observed. Cases have occurred, the jurisdiction over which being involved in so much doubt, the interested parties, from abundance of caution, submitted their memorials simultaneously to two of these federal departments. The Swiss Federal Assembly exercises a power more comprehensive and greater than that given probably to any legislative body; at least in a republic, where there is a professed organic distribution of the three great heads. It elects the Federal Executive, Federal Judiciary, and the Commander of the Army. It is the final arbiter on all questions as to the respective jurisdiction of the Executive and the Federal Court. It would appear that there is no decision of the Executive which cannot be revised by it. It is the chief power in the land. No veto can intervene nor any judicial power question the constitutionality of its statutes. Its acts form the law which the court must execute. The Swiss people, as it were, speak in each legislative enactment; and the only check or revision to which it is amenable rests with the people themselves by means of the _Referendum_. The authority of the Swiss Assembly, it is true, exceeds that of the Congress of the United States, and yet it may be regarded as a weaker body. For while in each case there lies in the background a legislative sovereign, capable of controlling the action of the ordinary legislature, the sovereign power is far more easily brought into play in Switzerland than in the United States. Again, every ordinary law passed by the Swiss Assembly may be annulled by a popular vote. The freedom from instruction secured to the members of the Federal Assembly was first declared in the Swiss Constitution of 1848. The whole history of the representative principle proves the soundness of the doctrine, that the vesting an entire discretion in the representative is an essential part of the definition. It is not to the power of instructing the representative that constituents are to look for an assurance that his efforts will be faithfully applied to the public service; but it is to the power of reducing him from the elevation to which their suffrages have raised him. The object to