I've seen a number of Christian principles in the Constitution. We could look at the protection of private property in the Constitution. We may do that later on. We could look at the prohibition of double jeopardy. We could look at the right to keep and bear arms and many, many other Christian principles in the Constitution. But I just want to begin with basically one or two Christian principles in the Constitution today and then continue and cover a few more during our next lecture on this subject. I'd like to begin first with the nature of man and the Constitution. Or original sin and the Constitution. The nature of man. Now to begin with, we have the fact that we've already seen that the Constitution is set in a historical context which is dominated very clearly by Christianity. Not dominated by deism, not dominated by would-be autonomous rationalism, but rather dominated instead by Christianity. Again, this does not mean that everybody in America was a Christian, nor that everyone in the Constitutional Convention which framed the Constitution, that hot summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, was a Christian. Nor does it mean that everyone in the state ratification conventions which ratified the Constitution was a Christian. But what it does mean is that these, that our society, or rather the 13 societies which joined together to form the Union, and their statesmen which they sent to Philadelphia to frame the Constitution, their statement which they sent to their state ratification conventions to decide whether or not to adopt the Constitution were dominantly Christian and that the Constitution even though it was not perfectly Christian in fact was we could say all too imperfectly Christian on several grounds which we may get to later but that these things were and these people were dominated by Christianity now we need to remember that We need to remember, as Dr. Bradford has pointed out in his book, A Worthy Company, which the Plymouth Rock Foundation has, I think, the Lord printed, pointed out that instead of these men being all, or virtually all of them, deists and rationalists and so forth, were Christian men. Dr. Bradford, who is himself a Christian, a Baptist, by the way, did not set out in his study to prove that these men were Christian, did not even expect to find that they were Christian, but merely found this out and was amazed by it in the course of his researches. He figured that when he first began to study these men, he would find out what he had been taught, that they were a bunch of rationalists indeed. And as he progressed along on his study, he found out that lo and behold, as he found a man who was not a Christian, that was a discovery. And if you read that book, A Worthy Company, you'll see that Dr. Bradford has it broken down, not only into the denominational affiliations of the men, but he also has figured out who were the militant Christians, who were the orthodox Christians, but not very outspoken about their faith, and one or two lukewarm Christians. And he figures that at least 30 out of the 55 men who framed the Constitution were militant, very outspoken Christians, presidents of Bible societies and so forth. Another 20 or so were Orthodox, from all that we can tell about their lives, and their lives are not always that easy to figure out. But from all that we can tell about the records that we have from their lives and so forth, were Orthodox, Bible-believing Christians, although they weren't very outspoken about their faith. Two or three of the men, let's say about three of the men who were not Christians, But by the same token, never spoke anything against Christianity either. Another revealing fact. And one man, I forgot exactly who that was now, was Dr. Bradford's figure, Luke Warren. Nevertheless, that is a very, very significant fact. And then again, when we figure that the subsequent studies which Dr. Bradford has done, on the men who were the leading figures in the state ratification conventions have come up with a similar set of statistics. That is to say that instead of being a bunch of deists and rationalists and so forth, these men too were dominantly Christian. If he finds a man who was not a Christian, that is a discovery. Not to say that these men were without sin in their lives. no more than we are, and to be sure, hymns can be discovered in their lives just as they could in our lives if we had biographers poring over our lives, looking for every juicy tidbit they could, and if we had written down as many things as they had and so forth. But they were Christians, dominantly And again, these leading men in the state ratification conventions were not insignificant men. They were great men, especially if you look at the men in Virginia, where you have Patrick Henry, who was very nearly as influential as George Washington, a great orator, who almost held the floor alone against the Federalists, although he worked with George Mason in opposition to them. So there were very, very great and able and notable men in the state ratification conventions who were the leaders, and they were Christians. And I strongly suspect that if someone, or actually a number of people, had the time and resources, and if the records were available about the ordinary folks, if I may put it that way, who were the representatives elected to those state ratification conventions, we would find out that they too were overwhelmingly Christians, certainly in their profession, and many, many of them in their practices as well. Now, this is significant because the Constitution, you must remember, is not only a product of those 55 men who, to one degree or another, took part in the deliberations in Philadelphia during that summer of 1787, but also of the representatives of those states which ratified it. They, too, had to give their stamp of approval to the Constitution. Or disapproval, as the case may be. And the Constitution, of course, was, in a way, I think, constructively modified by the addition of the Bill of Rights, although we could argue about that, and certainly they argued about whether a Bill of Rights should be added to it. But in any case, the end product, the Constitution that was originally sent out to the state, was certainly modified by the addition of the Bill of Rights, which came about as a result of agreements made in those constitutional conventions. are those ratification conventions which took place in the states, principally the Virginia Convention. But not only the Virginia Convention. So you've got to include in your assessment of the Constitution the fact that those men who were chosen by the state to represent them and reject or accept the Constitution had a very important impact on the end product. And if you want to understand what the intended meaning of the Constitution and all the provisions included in it were, you have not only to go to the Federalist Papers, which were really a plea by the supporters of the Constitution, the Federalists, for ratification of the Constitution, and a very great work in its own right, no doubt about that, which far overshadows the textbooks we use in our colleges today and in the graduate schools and so forth. But you also have to go to the debates in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and go through those and study them to find out what the men intended who framed the Constitution. And, beyond that, you have to go to something like Jonathan Elliott's great old book, or actually four-volume work, of the debates in the State Ratification Convention. So that you find out what the men intended who were ratifying the thing. Just as if you were to enter into a contract with somebody else sitting next to you. The contract must mean what you both commonly understand it to mean. It can't mean some secret meaning that you intend it to mean, or that they intend it to mean. You see, it has to have a commonly accepted meaning, and the meaning emerges through your understanding of what was said in the state ratification debate. Now, when we look at these state ratification debates, one of the things that we see, if we look closely enough, is that there is an awful lot of Christian rhetoric in these ratification convention wonderful christian rhetoric whether we're talking about the the federalists like uh... shall we say this great uh... position from philadelphia namescaping benjamin ross who was a federalist supporter of the constitution who uh... made a little speech in which he said that God had surely guided the hand of the men who had framed the Constitution and enabled them to create such a great document. Or, the Anti-Federalists who replied to him and said that he wouldn't attribute to God such an imperfect work. You can really see some very, very enjoyable Anti-Federalist rhetoric. And I think that the Anti-Federalists, well I don't think, I know very well, the Anti-Federalists have been sold short. And the Christianity of the Anti-Federalists in particular has been sold short. Late Herbert Storing, who was a professor of government or politics, whatever they called it, at the University of Chicago, edited a seven-volume edition of the writings of the Anti-Federalists, the seventh volume of which was a little, at least included a little volume, which has been printed separately, called What the Anti-Federalists Were For. And in that book, Dr. Storing doesn't mention at all that the Anti-Federalists were dominantly Christian. But the Christian rhetoric is the most visible form of rhetoric that we can see, that is, at least if you want to identify rhetoric coming at you from some religious or philosophical, and really the two are ultimately the same, position. Christian rhetoric and not Lockean rhetoric or Hobbesian rhetoric or humanistic rhetoric or Buddhist rhetoric or Mohammedan rhetoric. Christian rhetoric was dominant in these conventions, whether we're talking about the Federalists or the Anti-Federalists. That doesn't mean that they engage in theological arguments. But it does mean that the terms of discourse they used were clearly Christian. These are very, very wonderful Christian rhetoric, reading people like Thomas Treadwell up in New York and so forth, great lawyers in opposition to the Constitution and so forth. Thomas Treadwell, by the way, I think was one of these men who made the original unaccustomed-as-I-am-to-public-speaking speeches. I wish I had that speech to quote to you, but he said, I'm really unaccustomed to getting up in front of crowds like this and speaking. They came out with a wonderful, flowery, attack on how the framers of the Constitution had undermined our political faith and so forth. In any case, Christian rhetoric was dominant in the conventions that ratified the Constitution. Again, that indicates to me that there were Christian intentions that went into the Constitution, both for it and against it. And since the people, in the name of the Anti-Federalists, who were against the Constitution, effected some changes in the Constitution, that tells me that the end product was intended to be Christian. Now, we've seen also that, and we'll see at greater length, that the Constitution was not only preceded, but also followed by many, many connections between Christianity and civil government. And we've seen that nearly a century after the Constitution was framed and ratified, the secularists were attacking the connections between Christianity and civil government. Those connections which had always been there before the Constitution, which continued to be there through the Constitutional framing and ratification period, those connections would still persist up into at least the early 1870s, a number of which are still with us today. So then we can see, I think, many, many Christian principles in the Constitution, but I want to begin with a consideration of human nature in the Constitution. Now, no form of civil government can hope to endure or to, better yet, to produce liberty, protect liberty and justice, if it is not founded on a proper understanding of the nature of man. Obviously, civil governments are for men, understanding man in the generic sense, to include women folks also. If you have a a misunderstanding of the fundamental creatures for whom constitutions and forms of government are framed and established. Obviously things are going to go wrong. Now, despite the fact that virtually everyone who framed the Constitution, virtually all the men who ratified the Constitution were Christians, we're usually given secularist interpretations of their views of human nature. Those who recognize that the Founding Fathers did have a great distrust of human nature. I usually like to call them Hobbesians. Thomas Hobbes was an English political philosopher and also happened to be an atheist and grounded his whole system of thought basically on atheism, although he tried to set it within Christian terms so that it wouldn't be so offensive to the common ordinary people out there who lived in the society around him. Hobbes was very distrustful of human nature. He did have, you might say, a secularized understanding of original sin, but it wasn't really and truly an understanding of original sin. I just want to give you several models that humanistic scholars set up for us of human nature. which they say was the basis, or were the basis of the Constitution. Hobbes had a distrust of human nature. I won't go through the total process that he went through, but writing in the 1640s and 50s, he said basically that man is, what shall we say, naturally acquisitive, that men naturally want to control everything. the men naturally want to gratify their desires and in order to gratify those desires that men have they naturally want to exercise control over everything so that and Hobbes set up a little model that he called for understanding government called the state of nature so that man in a state of nature because He wants to control everything, is at war with every other man. Every man is at war with every other man. The state of nature is a state of war of each against all. And the state of man in the state of nature, he said, is therefore, the state of nature is a state of man without civil government. The state of man in the state of nature, because man wants to control everything, is a state of war of each against all. Therefore, the life of man, Hobbes said in a very memorable quote, is solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short. In other words, it's pretty much like it is in some of our less civilized areas of our own city and so forth, except everybody is a criminal after everybody else. So, he said, you have to have civil government established to get you out of the state of nature and into a state of society that you can live with and in, I might say. But what Hobbes did is to deduce from that an absolute government. When civil government was established, according to Hobbes, man had to have an absolute government. A government without limits. In fact, Hobbes wanted an absolute monarchy. But in essence, he wanted the rulers to be without limits on their powers. Why? So they can keep the rest of us in line. So they can use the power of the sword to keep the rest of us in line. Now, technically speaking, Hobbes did say that you had rights over against civil government. You have a right to life, you have a right to protect your property, and so forth. But, if I'm the ruler, if I'm the king, and you're the subject, and you do what I don't want you to do, you may claim all the rights you want, I have the power of the sword and I have the power to enforce my will on you. So in practice, really, you don't have any rights over against me. There are no limits on me. Certainly there's no God to whom you can refer, upon whom you can base your rights. Okay, so the point that I want to make is that while Hobbes did appreciate something of man's original sin, still his premise led him to conclude that you ought to have an absolute government. against which the individual had no real right, and upon which there were no limits. Obviously this is not what the framers of the Constitution came up with. Now if we go to John Locke, who followed Hobbes, did his writing in the 1680s, his political writing that is. Locke was a Christian, he was an Arminian Christian. as I said before, did not really appreciate original sin in the nature of man, because in his essay concerning human understanding, he said that man's nature is basically neutral, shall we say, at birth. Man is a tabula rasa. Man's nature at birth is really like a blank slate or a blank piece of paper. It is not fallen in sin. It is not really in rebellion against God, in ethical rebellion against his creator. But rather, it's like a blank slate. Or a blank piece of paper. And, as man grows up, he receives all sorts of sensory impressions through his five senses. Stimuli that come through his five senses. Impressions that come through his five senses. And those impressions write on his nature as it were that those impressions go to mold his nature into making what he is. These are various impressions that strike your nature as it were through your five senses as you are growing up and going through life and these impressions make you think what you think and do what you do and all that sort of thing. Now, basically what he was saying was that your environment determines what you are. By denying man's original sin and so forth. So you get, this by the way is one of the premises of modern liberalism. Man is not evil in his nature but he is neutral or, as we'll see in a minute when we get to Rousseau, he is good in his nature, he is naturally good. Now, if it is your environment which makes you what you are, then there are some very bad political consequences, as Dr. R.J. Rushton has pointed out, that flow from this. That is to say, if there are bad influences in your environment that make you think what you think and do what you do, then all we have to do is erase those bad influences, figure out some way to erase all those bad influences and give you nothing but good influences. My students always used to appreciate that. All right. But in order to do that, what must you have? In order to create that perfect environment? Well, to be a myth, you've got to have perfect knowledge. You've got to have knowledge about what constitutes good influences and what constitutes bad influences, right? That's the first thing you have to have. Then secondly, obviously, you have to have some means of controlling the environment so that you can screen out all these bad influences and filter in all these good influences. Which means that you have to have control over the environment. And ideally speaking, you've got to have total control over the environment. Now for liberals, of course, or those who call themselves liberals these days, basically that breaks down to the things that make man bad are a, ignorance, through which we deal with by means of free public education and that sort of thing, and faulty or bad social, economic, political institutions, which we deal with by means of reforming government and having government also seize hold of us and control all aspects of our lives. So you can see that if you really follow Locke's psychological teachings out to their political consequences, you get some bad political consequences. it leads ultimately to totalitarianism. Really Marxism is simply just a form of this, which says that everything that you believe and think and do, everything that goes on in your society is produced by economic causes. So that what we must do then is seize control of the economy, exercise totalitarian controls over that, radically restructure the economy to produce a socialist economy, This is, after all, what the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic, so-called, of China and so forth are claiming to do. Socialize the economy, make it entirely socialist, and thereby transform the nature of man. And in the meantime, since everything that you think is a product, according to their theory, of the economic class that you come from, they also obviously have to work on your mind. They have to exercise controls over education, controls over religion, Obviously religion must be eliminated because supposedly that's unscientific and because supposedly that's your religious belief or simply the product not of the Holy Spirit convicting you or if you're reading the Bible or anything like that but rather of the economic system that you live in and in particular the economic class that you come from or the social and economic class that you come from according to Marxist dogma. But the idea is that we must totally take over and control the minds of men, change the ideas of those whose ideas can be changed, eradicate those who can't be changed, that is, murder those who can't be changed, and so forth. And totally control the environment in order to control man, in order to produce perfection. Heaven on earth. Communism obviously produces hell on earth, whether it's run by communists or liberals, but to the extent that they follow out their own theories to that extent, We get political consequences that are diametrically opposed to those that John Locke wanted and to those that he wrote about in his political philosophy. He was a little inconsistent too. More than a little inconsistent. And we see that he went wrong by not basing himself on the scripture. All right. Now there's one other model that I might set forth here. And that is the model of Rousseau. Now, I need to really make this short because it's been a long time talking about Rousseau, but Rousseau said basically two things about the nature of man. One, that man is naturally good. Now you have to understand how Rousseau defined goodness. For Rousseau, the God of Scripture does not really exist. Nor certainly do the laws of God. exist in reality. They're not moral standards which we are bound to obey. So man's natural goodness consists in his desires being defined as being good. There are no moral standards, no moral absolutes which limit man, which say thou shalt not. Therefore, whatever man naturally desires is good. A major error, no doubt about that, one which has been disastrous. on many grounds, in many ways, had many, many disastrous consequences. Okay, he said, therefore, also that man, secondly, is born free. He said in his famous opening lines of his Social Contract, a man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains. By man being born free, he means that by nature man should be free to do whatever he will. So when Rousseau is talking about freedom, OK, you think you're naturally good, and that you are free. And he, and the liberals and others who follow him, mean by freedom, that quite honorable term, a perverse meaning of freedom. That is, that whatever, that freedom is the ability to do whatever you will. So, no moral limits set on this thing. Okay, Rousseau is doing his writing in about the 1750s and 1760s. You see Constitution textbooks and that sort of thing, you say, well, it was the thinking of the founders influenced by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, so they were light years away from Rousseau, I'll tell you that. There really are two consequences to which Rousseau was led by his thought, view of man's nature. I don't have the time to trace out exactly why he was led to these things, but let me assess them forth for you. First, for the elite people. Rousseau is usually misread. Everybody thinks that they are the elite that Rousseau is really writing to. For the elite, these people should be free to live in society and yet be free of all of its conventions, its moral conventions and that sort of thing. Live sort of like Rousseau did. He wrote a book called The Confession. about his life, which was deliberately entitled to confession because of Augustine's great Christian apology, the Confession. But Rousseau was not talking about his repentance of his sins because he didn't repent of his sins. He basically picked himself out a rich woman or two, shacked up with them, deposited the children in orphanages and so forth, and lived a very licentious, immoral life. A very, very brilliant man, but a very, very wicked one. But his confession was setting forth the life of a good man. In his terms. It's from Rousseau that we get the notions of beatniks and hippies kind of living and all that sort of thing. So there is one trough of Rousseau which leads to anarchism and to anarchical living. That is to a denial of any civil government. Based on the idea that man is naturally good and he's naturally free, that is to say he should be free to do whatever he will. And he's naturally good if you only throw off all these restraints of society, all these moral beliefs which restrain man from doing what he will, particularly all these Christian moral beliefs. If you'll throw off these civil governments, then man will return to that primitive state of nature or at least a primitive level of society or something analogous to that. Everybody will live in harmony, freely next to one another. That has not worked out very well in history, for obvious reasons. That comes from people's misreading of Rousseau, to think that what he wrote only for the elite, you might say, applies to everyone. But, if you read his social contract and discourses, you see that the solution he has for most all of us is totalitarianism. Now it would probably take too long to tell you why this is so, but what he wanted basically was a government, a civil government established, which would exercise controls over basically all areas of life, certainly over property. Didn't want any great inequalities of property, or much of anything in the way of inequalities of property. Wanted civil government to exercise controls over property. Wanted it really to exercise controls over education. wanted to exercise certain controls over religion and so forth was, needless to say, not a friend of Christianity. And in essence what we get in Rousseau is a government which is in principle totalitarian because there are no limits on it. By Hobbes it is absolute. Now this government is supposed to go by something he called the general will. But you have to understand something about the general will. It's usually misunderstood by people. We see it referred to all the time. The general will is the will of the majority of the people voting. Or so, in a way, is the greatest of Democrats because he says that public officials ought to be chosen by lot rather than by votes. And if everybody is equal, well, why not choose public officials by lot? But basically he said the general will exists when the majority votes But the majority doesn't just vote. It also has to have the intent. People have to vote with the intention not of promoting their own personal good, nor of the good of a little group that they belong to, but rather the good of the whole society. So you see, in order for that to come about, you've got to control the minds of the people. So that they all have to be thinking basically the same things and having at least the main intent. They may not agree on how to do it, but you have to have this transformation in the will of the people. Rousseau, incidentally, did talk a good deal about virtue, and like the ancient political thinkers, wanted to make the people virtuous. But this virtue for Rousseau was not Christian virtue. It was merely something, it was merely a set of beliefs and habits and so forth, into which the rulers molded the people. So in other words, you have a top-down civil government control over virtually all areas of life, no limits, really, on what the civil government can do to the individual, Well, you do have a problem. Who determines the general will? And how do you know what the general will is? Well, obviously, it's always determined in agreement with what I believe should be done. There is a problem, in other words, about who is it who knows the general will. Rousseau, if I had more time, I could show you, leads directly to Communism. Certainly Karl Marx acknowledged the parental lineage and so forth. Directly to Marxist thought and directly to much of modern socialism. But the idea of that I'm trying to get across was that for Rousseau you have a radically unchristian, anti-christian concept of human nature. Which he takes to two radically anti-christian political conclusions. Or at least which people take to radically anti-christian political conclusions. One, anarchism. The idea that everybody should be free to do what he or she wills. There should be no civil government and so forth. No real family or anything like that. Two, a basically totalitarian government. Usually, totalitarian governments which are democratic in form, by the way, there's an important book you ought to know, J. L. Talman's book, called The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, in which he traces largely back to Rousseau, not exclusively, but largely. Okay, the founding fathers, needless to say, did not want a civil government without limits. They did not want a civil government run by some mystical, mythical thing called the general will. We'll see that at much greater length. Now maybe that can help you appreciate a little bit how radically different the constitutional form of government is from modern notions of civil government. It's also radically different from ancient forms of civil government, which were also, as I'll point out later on, basically totalitarian in their scope, which gave the individual basically no civil rights or no no right over against government. Let's put it that way. And many of which, by the way, if you read Plato and company, were designed to have a ruler shape the minds of the people, shape them and make them virtuous through the power of civil government. So that you had rulers control over the minds of the people and over what the people could and couldn't do and all that sort of thing, designed to make the people, quote unquote, virtuous. as a means of molding the people so that they would fit into the mold preferred by the rulers. All right, now, founding fathers did not go by any of these pagan theories of government. They went by a basically Christian understanding of the nature of man. If you read the Federalist papers or read the debates in the state constitutional conventions, you'll see a lot of good quotes about human nature. I could take a lot of time to do that. Let me just read you a quotation from Federalist No. 51 from James Madison. who perhaps put the nature of man and its connection to civil government first. Speaking of the elaborate devices that the Founding Fathers designed to enable civil government to deal with human nature, in Federalist 51, Madison said, it may be a reflection on human nature that such devices are necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this. You must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. They recognize, unlike many ancient and modern political thinkers, that it is not angels, but rather merely men, fallen, sinful men, who are in positions of authority in civil government, as well as being ruled over by civil government. I think the Anti-Federalists recognize this even more than the Federalists did, but nevertheless, I think it is very clear that both the supporters of the Constitution and the opponents of the Constitution understood the fallen nature of man. understood the sinful vices of human nature and understood in addition that the sins of man apply not only to the rulers but also to the common man. Understood that these sins are going to manifest themselves in any form of government you establish but understood at the same time that you better very carefully design your governmental system to enable you to deal with the sinful nature of man. There are Many, many things that can be said about this, but you do get a number of good quotes about human nature in the early numbers of Federalists wherein they're talking about the desire to have a stronger central government. First let's notice why they wanted to have a stronger central government. What I'm going to get you into is the consideration of the governmental system they designed in the Constitution to deal with this fallen nature of man, the sinful nature of man. All right, first of all, they wanted a stronger central government. Why did they want a stronger central government? Well, most of them wanted a stronger central government in order to protect themselves against external attack. They wanted a stronger central government so that you could have a government with more power. Power was important. They recognized that power is important. They recognized that. You've got to have power, they said, in the early numbers of the Federalist Papers, about numbers 2 through 9, or 2 through 8 are the ones to see on this. You've got to have that power in the central government in order to avoid inviting the unjust wars that weakness will invite. If foreign nations see that you are weak, They're not going to let you remain weak very long, weak and unconquered. They're going to move in and under some pretext or another, they're going to unjustly attack you and overcome you. Now, we need to notice that they had a distinction between just and unjust wars, an old Christian biblical distinction. If you're weak, you're going to invite unjust wars. Now, if the central government is weak also, it will be unable to control the states. The states, all of you have 13 states that you're dealing with. Those states, conceivably, could have had 13 different foreign policies. And conceivably, some of those states could have done injustices to various foreign powers. If the central government were not strong enough to enforce one common foreign policy, then one or more of the states, by doing injustice to foreign powers, could invite a just war of retaliation against them for the injustices they've done to others. Make sense? Okay. But, if a foreign nation moved in and took over a couple of states because of the injustices they did, obviously that would place the rest of the states in a position of weakness. So, Hamilton and Jay argue in the early numbers of the Federalist Papers, you've got to have a strong government to enforce one common foreign policy. Both to avoid provoking just wars of retaliation against you, and to avoid inviting unjust wars of aggression by your weakness. Now they also wanted a more well-designed central government. A more well-designed central government. The reason for that is that in a more well-designed central government As I believe Hamilton, or Jay, tells us in one of the early numbers of the Federalist, the best men will consent to serve, and they will be chosen. At least generally speaking, though, they're not dealing in absolute certainties here. You're dealing with human beings. There's no guarantee that human beings are going to always choose the best men. But in a well-designed form of government, they argue, the best men, or at least better men, will be chosen to serve in the national government, and they will consent to serve. because it won't be in any way demeaning to them to go into this national government. Now we've got to remember that for a number of years after the Constitution was ratified, it was not the central government that was the most important government. The attachments of the people were to their states or to their local communities. And those local elections or state elections were more important than the national elections were. That's hard to believe, but it was true. People referred to their state, say Virginia, as my country. Or Massachusetts as my country. They were states in the traditional sense of the term. Nations. People thought of them that way. So, you wanted to design a form of central government that would attract the better men to serve in that government. And we'll talk about that a little bit more later on. But, as far as foreign policy went, you wanted to have better men serving in government because you'd be more likely to get just foreign policy. consistent foreign policy, long-range foreign policies and that sort of thing. Wise, let's just say just and wise foreign policy. And thereby you'd be more likely again to avoid provoking wars of just retaliation because you've done something unjust to other nations or to another nation. Or inviting wars of conquest or divide and conquer and that sort of thing because of the lack of wisdom the lack of a long-range view, the lack of foresight, the lack of consistency in your foreign policy. In other words, one of our big problems today is a lack of wisdom, a lack of consistency, and that sort of thing in our foreign policy. Unless you're saying we're consistently doing things that are foolish, that might be closer to the mark. But in any case, the Founding Fathers wanted to have a more well-designed system of national government in order to deal with these things. Now, secondly, when they turned to the internal affairs of government, of civil government. And they did make a distinction between civil government and other kinds of government. This, too, is a biblical principle. The civil government is only one kind of government. It isn't all there is to government. There, they ran into a colossal problem. And these men knew what sort of a problem it was because they knew history. And they saw history as a providentially ordered sequence of events. And since it was a providentially ordered sequence of events, it was a sequence of events with meaning and purpose in it. There were moral lessons and governmental lessons, ethical lessons that you could learn from studying history. So they believed you could learn how to design government and how not to design civil government. Didn't mean that you had a perfect answer to everything. Certainly not in this fallen world. But nevertheless, you could avoid the mistakes that men have made in the past. All right. The main problem that they faced in designing a frame of government was known as the problem of faction. To understand this you need to go to Federalist 10, but I think you really need to understand the whole form of civil government they designed. In Federalist number 9, Hamilton tells us that Even the ancient government, the ancient republics and so forth, had great talents. They had men of very great ability. But, he tells us, these talents were perverted by the vices of the civil government. In other words, the design of the government wasn't good, therefore, even though you had men of tremendous ability, those abilities were turned against the common good. They were turned against individuals' rights, and against the good of the whole society, whether it be city, state, or empire or nation, what have you. So they say, you can design a frame of government which will at least enable you to better foster justice, better protect liberty, and so forth. But the big problem they dealt with was the problem of faction. Now a faction you have to understand is a group of people. It's a group of people who are united and motivated. I won't quote you from Federalist Tab, but I'll paraphrase it, put it into more contemporary English. By some interest, or some set of ideas, or some principle, that is against either one or both of these things. Number one, other people's rights. other people's rights, or the common good. And by the way, they understood the common good not to be the good of just the majority, but to be the good of the whole society, including the good at the same time of each individual within that society. That's also a Christian concept. An old concept going back to the Bible and back to medieval times. Alright, factions then are groups of people who violate either other individual's rights or the common good. You've got to design a system of government that's going to enable you to deal with the problem of factions. Now, we need to know that factions can be either minorities or majorities. So we're dealing with two different things here. It's almost something you don't say in public today, that the majority can be a faction, that it can do injustice to the minority. That is, unless it's the selected minorities that the liberals want to use to promote their own political end. But the idea was that any majority, no matter whether it's formed on a religious basis or an economic basis, on some sort of ideological basis, what have you, any majority can Well, it can be motivated by evil designs. It can intend to do evil to others. Actually, we can make it a little more far-ranging than that. A majority can either be motivated by evil intentions or it can act unwisely. The people, Hamilton tells us, commonly intend the public good. But they don't always intend the public good. Sometimes they reason incorrectly about the means of promoting the public good. So even when they do intend the common good, which is not always, the majority can make an error about how to promote the public good. They can do something unwise. Pass unwise law, an unwise law, or a set of unwise laws that will produce bad consequences, unjust consequences, destructive consequences. A minority certainly can do that too, and needless to say, one man can do it as well. They weren't looking for a philosopher king to rule over them, not by a long shot. Nor for some sort of elite minority of philosopher kings, or in our contemporary terms, what should we say, a scientific elite or a technological elite to rule over them. We have this problem, then, about how to deal with minority or majority factions. In fact, we have the problem about how to deal with both of these kinds of factions. Well, you need to know a little bit more about factions in order to understand why they wanted so desperately, if I may put it that way, although it wasn't really desperate, to deal with factions in the proper way. Well, factions, Madison tells us in Federalist No. 10, have always been the death of popular government, and therefore the death of liberty. They have produced the death of popular government, or the death of liberty, because they introduced into the public councils any one of three different things. Let's see, where should we put these? They introduce into your law-making process, in other words, your decision-making process. Either instability, That is, changeable laws. Law is one thing today and another tomorrow and who knows what it will be next week or next year. Instability, injustice, and or confusion. There are really some great quotations that I could read you from a federalist on this, but in essence, instability, injustice, and confusion are introduced by factions into the public council so that your laws are changing and not stable. They don't have a long-run view. You don't have the rule of law. I may talk to you later on about the rule of law and how they designed the government for stability and the rule of law. That's another Christian principle. They introduce injustice, that is, The minority trying to tyrannize over the majority, or to oppress the majority. Or, on the other hand, the majority tyrannizing over the minority, seeking to oppress the minority, or the individual. Or, confusion. You have contradictory laws, laws that work at cross purposes. Laws that are so confused, let's say like reading the Federal Register today. You have companies that have to devote one man's entire time or maybe a whole team of people's entire time for the year to trying to figure out what the latest laws are and what the impacts of those government regulatory agencies laws are on your company. How best to deal with them and so forth. And these things written in bureaucracies as they are are not necessarily all that easy to understand. So it produces all sorts of bad economic consequences as well as social consequences. But looking back at history, ancient as well as modern history, these men said factions have everywhere been the death of popular government. They have killed popular government. And with that they have killed liberty and justice. So we've got to figure out a way to deal with this problem of factions. Now, a little bit more needs to be said about factions. You have to understand the origin of faction. Please read Federalist No. 10. Read it very carefully. It's usually misread by people. Even in graduate schools, they don't read it as closely as they should. And you get a lot of people who try to make an economic determinist kind of thing out of it. That is to say, although Madison does stress economics as a cause of faction, he also talks about religion as being the cause of faction. And all sorts of other ideas that people have, and all sorts of other political or what you would say manifestations of human desires and appetites and so forth that unite them to form political organizations and to do injustice or unwise things. So really he is seeking to protect against all sorts of things that join people together to do injustice or confusion. Now these factions originate from the nature of man. In Federalist No. 10 we're told that there are two possible ways of dealing with factions. One is to remove their causes. The second way is to control their effects. Now, how would you remove the causes of faction? Well, you might give everybody the same ideas, the same interests, the same opinions about things. And that's one way to do it. If you could give everybody the same ideas, the same interests, the same opinions, have sort of a cookie-cutter totalitarian society, stamp everybody out of the same mold, then we wouldn't disagree with each other, you wouldn't have political faction form, and everything would be hunky-dory. There is a problem, there are several problems with that, obviously, I hope there are. To begin with, they said, the causes of faction are sewn into the nature of man. And the implication is you can't operate on them and remove them. They are necessarily bound up with the nature of man and you can't extricate them from man's nature. You're stuck with them. So you can't remove the causes. Okay, what are the causes? Well, to begin with, man's reason is solid. It's fallible. says Madison. Man's reason is fallible. You don't have any platonic philosopher king with their infallible reason. Secondly, man's reason and his self-love are attached to each other. so that everybody prefers his or her opinions to everybody else's contrary opinions. Man's reason and his self-love are connected so that his opinions and his passions have a reciprocal influence on each other, says Madison. Everybody therefore prefers his or her opinions to everybody else's. I'm right and you're wrong to the extent that you disagree with me. So, This too prevents us from following any wise elite race of philosopher kings or scientists or what have you, would be secular saviors of us. And then thirdly, it is through man's faculties, that is through his mental capabilities, that he acquires the different degrees and kinds of properties. Through the use of your faculties, your mental capabilities, you acquire different degrees and kinds of property. And it's the business of government, civil government, to protect property. Say that you're an inventor. You think of a way to make a better mousetrap or a Frisbee or whatever. You have to use your mind to design the better mousetrap or the better frisbee. You have to use your mind to direct your muscles or somebody else's muscles to go through the actual work that's required to make the frisbee. You wouldn't have that frisbee or that better mousetrap without using your faculty. Now, depending on how well that sells, you will acquire more and more property. You see. Because people can use their minds for different purposes. And he has in mind here the honest use of your faculty. He says, through the use of your faculties, of men's faculties, they acquire different degrees and kinds of property. Different amounts of property and different kinds of property. Now we should keep in mind that Madison did not just mean, in general I would say the founding fathers did not just mean by property, physical, material property. If you read Madison's essay on property, which was published in the National Gazette about March or so 1792, you'll see that he very clearly states that there is non-physical property as well as physical property. In other words, men's ideas, their opinions, their beliefs, their religious beliefs, in particular, are their property. Now to be sure, ideas and opinions and beliefs and religious beliefs are a different kind of property. In a sense, they're property that we can share. But by the same token, those ideas have to be protected too. Civil government has it as its duty to protect men's ideas, their beliefs, their religious beliefs in particular. Man has, says Madison, a very property of peculiar value in his religious opinion. So the most important kind of property is your religious opinion. But in general, Madison sees men's ideas as being more important and their knowledge as being more important than the physical property that they have. That doesn't mean that he's trying to downgrade physical property. But he wants both physical and non-physical property protected by civil government. So that you can't have, let's say, a religious minority tyrannizing over another kind of religious majority, shall we say, nor a religious majority tyrannizing over a religious minority. He wants to protect liberty of conscience and that sort of thing. Also, we have things like copyright laws and patent laws which protect men's ideas or protect the physical inventions that men have come up with. I don't understand how that's a cause of sanctioning. Okay. That's, I think, fairly easy to explain. Let's just look at material property, for starters, and then go to non-material property, which is not to say immaterial property. We have divisions in society, Madison says, in Federalism, between the rich and the poor. The Marxists and the Socialists really make a lot of hay out of that. So there are people who are without wealth, naturally, and their fallen natures tend to envy those who have wealth. Well, the Bible forbids envy. Where there are divisions of property like that, then you're going to have divisions between the rich and the poor. You will also have, Madison points out, divisions in which you have the rich, you have a certain kind of property, allied to the poor, or the people of middling wealth, who have a certain kind of property. Rich farmers, for example, have an interest in common with middle-class farmers and poor farmers. People involved in manufacturing, for example. While there is a certain hostility, especially when you have socialism around, a socialist rhetoric around, between the management and the owners and the workers, so-called, so people in managerial positions never worked, you know, or owners of companies never had to work, which is ridiculous. But while there is that hostility, they also have a common interest in that, let's say, people engaged in shipbuilding, whether they're out there welding metal plates together or designing things or what have you, all have a common interest in the prosperity of the company and in the prosperity of the industry. They don't want shipbuilding to go under. So they can form then political factions which will seek to use government, shall we say, to get themselves subsidies at the expense of others. Or to relate this to early American political history, you had a lot of theft, I would say, practiced through the government on the basis of the tariff being used to supply so-called internal improvements for people who wanted their harbors improved and all that kind of thing, canals and whatnot. So people can formed in all sorts of factions on an economic basis like that. And obviously when you get to ideas, you have liberals and conservatives and so forth, and you have Well, one of the fears that was voiced about the Constitution was, well, maybe someday the Pope can be elected president. There's nothing in the Constitution to prohibit it. Of course, the Federalists argued against that. But the fear was that, look, we'll get Roman Catholicism imposed on us, we're a bunch of Protestants, and we'll be in a heap of trouble if that happens. Or we might have Mohammedans immigrate in here, or Jews, or atheists, diagnostics, and so forth, and they'll take over the government. It was a fear you see that's been stated several times by anti-Federalists, particularly in Massachusetts and North Carolina. uh... where this uh... issue of a religious test was uh... debated more extensively and the idea was that uh... if we don't make some kind of protection against this then you're going to have this minority group which may become the majority and may tyrannize over us so there are all sorts of bases upon which people can form factions and then tyrannize over others and all you have to do is look at our the operation of our civil government today and it is really the glorification of faction in which you go out and try to Tax, tax, spend, spend, elect, elect, as FDR was told. Tax everybody as much as you can, spend on everybody so that they'll be obligated to you as much as you can and put together a coalition that will enable you to get elected and effect your will into politics. Wonderful. Okay. Now, what did they do? Let's get to the solution. We've been through some of the problems. OK. But we've got to remember then they wanted to protect the faculties of man. That's not a bad goal. That's a pretty high goal when you get right down to it. Protect the mind of man. Because it's through the use of your mind that you acquire different degrees and kinds of property. OK. So, because... OK. I want to get back here. Before we get to the solution, we have to recognize that because the causes of faction are sown into the nature of man, you can't remove them from the nature of man, It's unrealistic to try to remove the causes of faction. Now, not only is it unrealistic, but Madison said the cure would be worse than the disease. If you did try to remove the causes of faction, you would kill liberty as well as justice. If you tried to give everybody the same interests, opinions, and that sort of thing, what would you be doing to the faculties of man? You'd be doing a great injustice to the faculties of man. Intellectual liberty, religious liberty, and so forth would go out the window. That's right. You'd have nothing left. That's right. So, if you want to protect that, you've got to design a form of government that will not try to remove the causes of factions. But rather, you've got to, because you want to preserve liberty and justice, and you don't want to do something that's absurd and utopian, you've got to then seek to control the effects of factions. So that's what they decided to do. to design a framework of government, a civil government, that would, the best they could, control the effect of faction. Okay. Would the fathers have grounded C, which are right in there, in terms of the theological creativity? I think it's very clear that Madison would have. And I think that the others would have understood that because he had a whole long tradition of liberty of conscience. that was that of course later the first amendment and the preceded this and that most of them believed in uh... i think it's safe to say they would have they didn't always state things in the precise theological terms we'd like them to state them in but nevertheless i think the principles were there uh... they were very very and we've got to remember that it was anglicans like uh... madison and these nominal anglicans even like jefferson who worked for the disestablishment of the anglican church in the south shall we say uh... because they had seen the persecution of the Baptists and others and said this isn't right. Because they had that common belief, that Puritan idea of liberty of conscience. Alright, to control the effects of faction then, there are a number of things you have to do. And looking back at the various forms of civil government that men have had, they figured they knew a few things to avoid as well as a few things to do. The first thing they wanted to do, something we must remember, is to avoid establishing a democracy. They did not want a democracy. Now, this is going against some of the God terms of our age, I recognize. But nevertheless, these people knew the history of democracy. Knew the history of the Greek democracy, the turbulence and faction they went through. What injustices they did to the minority. What destruction they did to liberty. What destruction they did to justice. As well as to people's lives and so forth. So they wanted to avoid democracy. Now, why did they want to avoid democracy? Okay, let's define democracy here. Democracy is a system of government in which the majority rules through free and relatively frequent elections. Let's just leave it at something like that. It's a system of majority rule. But in a democracy, unless it's a well-designed one, there is no limit on majority rule. And that's the key. You've got to have limits on majority rule. Otherwise, your majority is going to turn into a majority faction. Because of the fallen nature of man. Now, there are various bases of this. A majority, they recognize very clearly, can seize on one man that it thinks is really great and follow that man. Be his name Kennedy or whatever, Roosevelt or what have you. So that a majority can be misled by one man who is a very great orator, who has a very great appearance about him and a very great control of himself so that he is able to manipulate the public through his actions and through his words. It's very easy to see a lot of that in ancient history. These men read a lot of ancient history. So, they recognize then that even though you have a form of democracy, a democracy can actually end up being ruled by one man who gets the majority to go along with him. And majorities are not known for their discernment all that much. They go for very superficial characteristics. Then, In addition, they knew that a majority can also be misled by a little elite. It can be manipulated by an elite. So, again, you have the form of democracy, but the substance of elite rule. So, after avoiding democracy, the second thing they thought to do would be to establish a republican form of government. Why? Because the Republican form of government makes it possible, not certain, but possible, for the majority, through their representative, through its representative, to vote down minority factions. It isn't certain, but it's possible to eliminate this elite rule by having a well-designed republic. Majorities, representatives can vote down minority factions. But then you're still left with the problem of majority faction. Okay? So what do you do to enable you to deal with majority faction? All right. What you have to do is establish not simply a republic, but a well-designed extended republic, says Madison in Federalist No. 10. All right, the key to an extended republic is that it gives you two things. Well, republican government gives you one thing. You have the representative principle. Rather than in a democracy having, let's say, all the people in the town get together and vote on something, You send representatives. And the basic idea is that those representatives are smarter and more knowledgeable than the average voter. And that being smarter and more knowledgeable, they are more likely to produce wiser, juster policies. There's no guarantee that they will, but they're more likely to. And if you design the institutions well, they argued, then you're even more likely to get wise policies out of these men. Wise, just policies. So you want representatives then You want the representative system because it enables you to refine and enlarge the public views, as Madison says in Federalist 10, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens who are more distinguished by their patriotism and so forth, knowledge within the patriotism. Alright, but the key to the extended republic is that it enables you to break up potential majority factions because it takes in more territory. And by taking in more territory, you take in more diverse groups. And it becomes harder for potential majority factions to get together and then to act in unison to oppress the minority, to do something unjust or unwise. There's no guarantee of it, but it makes it harder to do. So you break up potential majority factions. Now then, beyond that, you have to design, fourthly, let's say, your representative institutions. You want to make sure that your legislature is not too big. Why? Because if it's too numerous, even we're told in about Federalist 53 or so, or 57, I forget which, even if it's composed of all Socrateses, The size of the representative body will produce chaos. You can't deliberate wisely in a body that's too large. That, by the way, is why the Senate was made smaller than the House of Representatives. You've got to have institutions that are of the right size. You don't want them too big because you'll have chaos. On the other hand, you don't want them too small because then you've got elite rule and the possibility of minority faction again. So what do you do? Well, what you do is, among other things, to design a system in which you have one part of your legislature, the House of Representatives, being larger and based more on the democratic principle, more on majority rule. And you design another house, namely the upper house, the Senate, which is based instead on a different principle which is smaller, deliberately designed to be smaller. Partly for wisdom and for justice and so forth. Alright, now we need to notice also the business of separation of powers and checks and balances. Understanding that the legislature has to be the right size. I want to talk about this a little bit more, about the institution a little bit more. First I want to go into separation of powers and checks and balances. The system of separation of powers and checks and balances can really be seen in every level of our civil government. The local governments had separation of powers galore. Everybody was, virtually everyone down to the dog catcher was elected and therefore didn't owe his appointment to others and so forth. He was, in a sense, independent of the other people. At the state level you had separation of powers in particular because you had a division between the executive, that is the governor, and the legislature usually divided into an upper house and a lower house, and the judiciary. He didn't have all powers concentrated in any one hand. Even Jefferson himself said in notes on the state of Virginia that the concentration of all powers in any one set of hands is the very definition of tyranny. He also said, thinking of those who thought, well, if the people elect the majority, if the majority elect these representatives, we'll avoid tyranny, he said, 173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one. So, you want to avoid any kind of tyranny. You want to avoid concentrating all power in anyone's hands because you're dealing with men who are fallen men, no matter whether they're elected by the majority or the minority. All right, so, separation of powers, however, the founding fathers could not do anything to the local government, couldn't do anything to restructure the state government. They did, however, guarantee a republican form of government to them. So she didn't have monarchies growing up in Massachusetts or anywhere else. Louisiana, shall we say. But beyond that, they couldn't really go in and restructure the state's government. The Constitution never would have been accepted if they'd tried something like that. So what they had to work with was the central government. Okay, what kind of system did they establish? Well, they established a system in which they had a separation of powers between the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch. And, of course, what they did was, first of all, because they knew the danger of an excessively powerful legislature, they divided the legislature into two houses. The House of Representatives. Doesn't look like a very good house, but, you know. And the Senate. The reason they did this is that they didn't want the legislature to be too powerful. They knew that in a Republican government where you have a fairly weak executive, the legislative branch tends to dominate over the other branches. They didn't want any one branch dominating, having total power in its hands, so they had to weaken the legislative branch. So what they did is to divide the legislative branch into two houses, a lower house and an upper house, and to give each branch a different motivating principle. The House is mainly, or was mainly intended to be democratic. Doesn't mean they wanted a bunch of Democrats in there necessarily. But they wanted the House to be the more popular branch, closer to the people, more dependent upon the people. Now they wanted this for reasons of liberty. The more dependent the House was on the people, the more impact the people's will would have on the central government, the less likely they would be to be ruled over by a little clique of people in the central government. They'd be able to throw out all of these people. Just think about the characteristics of the House of Representatives. These men are directly elected by the people. Direct popular vote. How long is their term of office, their tenure? Their tenure is only two years. Every two years we can get rid of everybody in the House. Return him to private life where he should be. Or most of them should be. This makes the House of Representatives very dependent upon the people. It's also pretty large as legislative bodies go. Much bigger than the Senate is. Why? Because it's based on population. That's democratic, too. You have proportional representation. The more people you have in your state, the more representatives you get in Washington, D.C. Okay, so it's size, the fact that it's based on proportional representation, it's based on population, in other words, the fact that it's directly elected, the fact that it's only there for a few years, all are democratic principles. They tie it more closely to the people. They tie it more closely to the majority. Because overall, the House of Representatives represents the national majority. Now the Senate was deliberately designed to counteract this democratic principle in the House. The founders wanted this democratic principle in there for the House of Representatives. Without it, what confidence would the people have in the central government? But they also knew that that democratic principle was very, very dangerous. So they thought to counteract it through the House, through the Senate, through the Presidency, and in a sense through the Supreme Court. Well, the Supreme Court wasn't intended to have nearly the role that it's been given. Okay, we'll call these guys little houses, too. All right. What the founding fathers tried to do, as Dr. Paul Eidelberg, who tried to teach me government in graduate school, pointed out, was to design into these other institutions basically aristocratic principles that would check against the democratic principle of the House, and would also work to infuse more wisdom and hopefully more justice and so forth also into our governmental decisions to help overcome that instability, that injustice and that confusion that you get from factions. So, what do they do for the Senate? Well, how long are Senators in office? Okay, six years. I would say too that they are indirectly, at least they originally until the 17th Amendment, which evidently was not ever properly ratified, just like the 16th Amendment, by the way. That's another story, though. Until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913, Senators were elected, as the Constitution said, in the manner that the state legislature shall determine. Most of them were elected, I think virtually all of them, were elected by the state legislature. Which, as Tom pointed out this morning, gave the state legislature a direct check against the central government. That too, by the way, is another aspect of separation of powers that I want to get into in checks and balances. But we'll have to get to that in a minute. Okay, they're in there for six years, and by the way, you can't elect all of them out at any one election. Their terms are staggered, so you can only get rid of a third of them at a time. That too makes for stability. Okay, six years in office, they're indirectly elected. Chosen by the state legislatures who would be much better able to discern the true character of the man. Would not go for such superficial things as we voters usually go for. All right. Also the size of the Senate is designed to be very small. Now this wasn't simply so that the Senators could represent their states. It was also because The founders wanted wisdom in the deliberation of the Senate. Small fives make for more wisdom in deliberation. If you've ever attended any convention, you can understand that. All right. In the presidency, you've got a little bit of monarchy, by the way. Okay. In the presidency, you have a little bit of monarchy. You've got one man in office. This was designed, by the way, also to attract the most excellent man to office, as you can see from reading Federalist 72. The small size of the Senate, by the way, was also designed to attract better men to office, and the indirect election was designed to get them into office. The fact that the Senate was small would also mean that the people who elect them could keep better track of who's doing what, and therefore would make them tend to serve the public good even if they're not personally inclined to do so. You've got a lot of things working together here. Okay, small size of the President, the one man. How long is he? Very, very attractive. Very, very prestigious position to attract the best men to office. In addition, though, you've got to check against him. And he is very visible for what he does. He catches a lot of flack for what he does. So he's bound to feel much more responsible. Now, the president was, after much debate, they decided on a four year term. He's in there for four years and he can succeed himself in office. This, they saw, is eliminating a lot of problems and enabling us to get some good service out of the president, by the way. So four years, then he could succeed himself in office. That's important, too. I don't have time to go into exactly why that's so, but you'll see that in about Federalist 71 and 72. Okay. Okay, so you've got the size, you've got the tenure, four years. You need to know about the Electoral College. It didn't work out exactly the way the framers wanted to because of political parties. But the president was certainly designed to be elected indirectly, not popularly elected. And the Electoral College was designed, even though it hasn't worked out that way, to get into office a man who would be distinguished for his independence and his integrity. That's hard to believe, but it's true. They very, very carefully designed that thing. In fact, they spent more time arguing about and reasoning about how to elect the president than they did anything else in the Constitutional Convention. Very, very difficult decision. The Supreme Court obviously was designed to be very, very aristocratic. They're appointed for life. Or, that is, good behavior, but it works out basically for life. The size wasn't specified in the Constitution, but you can be sure they didn't want a thousand Supreme Court justices. They wanted that body to be small so that it could deliberate wisely. And it was designed certainly to be not only indirectly elected, but doubly indirectly elected. Not so they could be a little elite ruling over all of us, making laws and remaking the Constitution every time they sit like they do now. But rather so that they would be the most stable aristocratic element in government, would be able to check against changes that would come through the governmental system. So. Now, is the Supreme Court elected? Well, it has to be appointed by the President with the approval of the Senate. President's indirectly elected, Senate's indirectly elected. Very, very far removed from popular, from the popular will. Now, I suppose I should add to this, in fact, I don't suppose I know very, very well, I should add to this several other things that we ought to just note briefly. One of those is federalism. We're told in Federalist 51 by Madison that federalism gives you a double security to your liberty by setting the state over against the central government so that the state can exercise control against the central government. And if the central government gets too unjust, too centralizing, too tyrannical in its rule, the states, through their election of senators, have a check on them. Also, in a way, because the people of the states elect the members of the House, you have another check. the faith also figure into the presidential electoral system uh... and you have you have means of the state checking the federal government that would be the big thing of course but you have methods whereby the state can check the federal government he said something about uh... a two-party system in which now the president isn't indirectly voted in he's still indirectly voted in but the parties uh... play a much much bigger role in is uh... election that they used to her then they they were they tried to prevent party from arriving and they didn't want parties to arrive they really wanted him to be elected on the basis of his merit not on the basis of what what what he'd said that this group that group and the other group and what political i'll use the ode and all that sort of thing that was the whole reason why they designed the electoral college in such an elaborate way i need more time to talk about that i can do it but i i want to make another couple points if i could please Federalism was very, very important. Along with federalism, you had, of course, a written Constitution, which was written down precisely because they wanted those limits on the civil government and on its various officials to be clear. The limits on the men in the House, the Senate, the Presidency, the Supreme Court. And the Constitution, by the way, was understood to be an expressed powers document. That is, it was understood, you see it very clearly in reading the state ratification debates and so forth. It was understood that the central government has only those powers delegated to it by the states in the Constitution and no other. This was said again and again by supporters of the Constitution in those debates. They intended it to be an express powers document. It is limited by the powers expressly delegated to it. That meant also that the rest of the powers, as the Tenth Amendment was to make clear, are reserved to the states. The states have all those powers that have not been forbidden to them in the Constitution or delegated by them to the central government. Finally, I suppose I should say one more thing, just because our time is fleeting. That is that If you read Federalist 28, you will even see that Hamilton, the biggest centralizer of the Constitutional Convention, set forth as an argument for the ratification of the Constitution that if the central government gets too tyrannical, and if all other means fail, then the people, through the faith, through the leadership of their state governments, can turn to even armed resistance against the tyrannical central government. And he set forth as an argument for the ratification of the Constitution that this can be done much better through the federal system than it can through a unitary state, that is, a centralized state.