We want to examine now how they derived at this form of government.
The first republic in the history of man kind
The word republic comes from the Latin words res publica meaning "matter of the people". Abraham Lincoln described this form of government in his Gettysburg address as "a government of the people, by the people, for the people".
A republic is not the same as a democracy (demos = greek for people), even so many people say so. In a republic the people elect out of their midst representatives for themselves. These representatives meet together in a house and there create laws and rules for the people who elected them. In a pure democracy, as it was first conceived in ancient Greek city states, no representatives are elected. Everybody can propose a law and all the people will then vote on it. Switzerland's government is the closest form of government today to a democracy.
The founding fathers had studied history very carefully with its various forms of governments, their advantages, disadvantages and downfalls. They were looking for a medium in between a tyranny and anarchy.
|
tyranny ---------------------------------------------- |
------------------- peoples law ------------------- |
--------------------------------------------- anarchy |
They had also studied God's Word, the bible very careful and found the very first form of representative government with a distinct hierarchy in the books of Moses.
We can recognize toady's hierarchy of America's government here:
one nation
several states
thousands of counties
tens of thousands of communities
tens of millions of families
hundreds of millions of individuals
A limited government
The founding fathers in the constitutional convention only had to worry about setting up the federal government at the top of the hierarchy. Every level of government below the top was already established.
Most important to determine was now, which tasks the federal government had to take on and which tasks were better left to the states and the counties. From their experience with the weak congress during the time of the war of independence the founding fathers new, that national defense was the number one task the federal government had to fulfill.