As1 Hns Constitution Federalists/Anti-federalists Quiz

Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.

The absurdity must continually stare us in the face of confiding to a government the direction of the most essential national interests, without daring to trust to it the authorities which are indispensable to their proper and efficient management.

The vigor [strength] of government is essential to the security of liberty

States are the characteristics and the soul of a confederation. If the states be not the agents of this compact, it must be one great consolidated National Government of the people of all the States.

The number of the representatives [called in for the Constitution of 1787] appears to be too few, either to communicate the requisite information of the wants, local circumstances, and sentiments of so extensive an empire, or to prevent corruption and undue influence in the exigencies of such great powers.

I am against inserting a declaration of rights in the Constitution …if such an addition is not dangerous, it is at least unnecessary.

In our case, the concurrence of thirteen distinct sovereign wills is requisite under the Confederation to the complete execution of every important measure that preceeds[sic] from the Union. It has happened as was to have been foreseen. The measures of the Union have not been executed; and the delinquencies of the States have step by step matured themselves to an extreme, which has, at length, arrested all the wheels of the national government and brought them to an awful stand.

A federal government …ought to be clothed with all the powers requisite to complete execution of its trust.

We are now fixing a national consolidation.

…one government …never can extend equal benefits to all parts of the United States. Different laws, customs, and opinions exist in the different states, which by a uniform system of laws would be unreasonably invaded.

This country should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.

The states should have laws, courts, force, and revenues of their own sufficient for their own security; they ought to be fit to keep house alone if necessary; if this be not the case, or so far as it ceases to be so it is a departure from a federal to a consolidated government.

A bill of rights …serves to secure the minority against the usurpation and tyranny of the majority.

The …new form of government …declares a consolidation or union of all the thirteen parts, or states, into one great whole …it is an intuitive truth that a consolidated republican form of government [will lead] …into a monarchy, either limited or despotic.

If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure …in a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger.