Again and again, both in public and in private, we hear the same demand: till we have a responsible Ministry the Constitution will never work.

Two years later a motion was introduced and passed through the Reichstag demanding the formation of a Federal Ministry; Bismarck opposed the motion and refused to carry it out.
He had several reasons for omitting what was apparently almost a necessary institution.

The first was respect for the rights of the Federal States.

If a Ministry, responsible to Parliament, had existed, the executive power would have been taken away from the Bundesrath, and the Princes of the smaller States would really have been subjected to the new organ; the Ministers must have been appointed by the President; they would have looked to him and to the Reichstag for support, and would soon have begun to carry out their policy, not by agreement with the Governments arrived at by technical discussions across the table of the Council-room, but by orders and decrees based on the will of the Parliament.

This would inevitably have aroused just what Bismarck wished to avoid.