Roscoe Bartlett: “When our Founding Fathers wrote our Constitution, they thought that they had implicitly placed in that Constitution all…”

“When our Founding Fathers wrote our Constitution, they thought that they had implicitly placed in that Constitution all of the great guarantees of freedom and individual rights that were needed for this new Nation. But the ink was hardly dry on the Constitution before they wondered if people would really understand that it was the people who are to be preeminent in this new country, that there was to be a very limited government, and it would truly be a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Because they felt that what was very implicit in the Constitution might need to be stated explicitly, they developed 10 amendments, actually I think a dozen started through the process and 10 of them made it through the process, and we call them the Bill of Rights. They were adopted, of course, in 1791. And I think that it's no accident that that first amendment addresses two of the huge concerns they had from their past that should never blemish their new country.”