The Constitution bore a strong imprint of the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who wanted a loosely organized confederation in which sovereignty rested with the individual states as a whole.

The king was head of state and was responsible for executing federal laws passed by the parliament but had no veto right.

The individual states retained their statehood, constitutions, successions to the throne and electoral rights, although they lost their sovereignty to the Confederation.

[5] On 10 June 1866, four days before the start of the war, the Prussian government had presented the other German states with the outlines of a new federal constitution containing ten articles that formulated its key principles.

[6] A Reichstag was to be elected as a constituent assembly according to equal, secret and universal manhood suffrage, which had been the electoral law of the 1848 revolution.

[7] The governments of the states of the new North German Confederation were then to submit a draft constitution to the assembly for final approval.

The state governments adopted Bismarck's final amendments and submitted them to the constituent Reichstag on 4 March 1867.

Under the final form of the Constitution, the constituent states sent representatives to a Bundesrat (Federal Council), which participated in legislation on an equal footing with the Reichstag.

Each individual state was authorised to make proposals for the exercise of federal supervision, to represent them and to have them discussed in plenary session (Article 7).

The king alone was responsible for concluding all international treaties, but they required the approval of both the Bundesrat and the Reichstag if their content was subject to federal legislation (Article 11).

The North German Constitution was indirectly based on the Frankfurt Imperial Election Act of 12 April 1849 in which the principles were implemented.

He hoped that Austria and Russia would not draw the attention of their populations to the suffrage withheld from them and would therefore pass over the emergence of a new power in Europe in silence.

In order to end impasses, it was permissible for the Bundesrat, in agreement with the king of Prussia and the countersigning federal chancellor, to dissolve the Reichstag (Article 24).

The king of Prussia was the head of state (referred to in the Constitution as the "presidium") of the North German Confederation (Article 11).

Foreign policy power was also concentrated in the hands of the king because neither the approval of the Reichstag nor the countersignature of the chancellor was required for acts of command and military organisation (Article 63).

The Prussian votes were instructed by the minister president of Prussia, who was also chancellor and chairman of the Bundesrat (Article 15).

[8] As "chiefs of the troops in their territory", the federal princes were military rulers only at need and without command authority (Article 66).

If customs and excise duties were not sufficient, the individual states were obliged to make additional levy contributions (Article 70).

Until 31 December 1871 (which turned out to be beyond the life of the North German Confederation), the budget for the army was submitted to the Reichsrat for information only (Article 71).

The individual states retained their statehood, constitutions, succession to the throne and their electoral rights, which were restricted to certain groups of people.

The Constitution also left untouched the previous responsibilities of the individual states such as policing, budgetary law, religion, schools and universities.

The Constitution did not prohibit the individual states from changing the monarchical form of government to a republican one or vice versa.

[21] The North German Confederation was successful because the Reichstag with its liberal majority, the Bundesrat, the chancellor and the president of the federal chancellery, Rudolf von Delbrück, were able to create the long-sought unified economic area in just four years.

It was only later, under the German Empire and its constitution that the limited influence of the chancellor and Reichstag on foreign policy became noticeable, and it was not until the 20th century that an incorrectly composed Reich leadership and an uncontrolled Supreme Army Command caused the monarchical federal state to fall into a deep decline.