The Bill of Rights is the name we give to the first ten amendments to our Constitution. These first ten amendments were necessary to get the remaining states in the Union to ratify the Constitution. This piece of legislation is what gave us our most important individual rights, such as freedom of speech and religion. It has not been an easy road though and there has been a lively debate on both sides as to whether this should be included or not. In this article, I intend to argue for Federalists why a Bill of Rights did not need to be included in the Constitution. One of the most important reasons why Federalists fought so hard against the inclusion of a Bill of Rights was because they believed it would go against the ideal that a government should have limited powers (377). The proposed legislation would contradict the essence of a written constitution as a product of a social contract, which states that all power initially rests with the citizens and that it is the citizens who construct a government with limited powers and listed. in a written constitution. For example, Federalists argued that deliberately stating that the right to religion should not be violated could be misinterpreted by people believing that if the Constitution did not specifically state this restriction, the government would possess this power. . In other words, Federalists feared that people might think that the Constitution gave the government unlimited power and that putting specific provisions into a bill of rights would only increase the feeling that the only rights that were written were the only ones removed from the law. a government whose power is generally unlimited. This was obviously not what the framers...... middle of paper ...... said that every person in the country has natural and inalienable rights simply by virtue of being human beings , therefore writing these rights again in a second document seemed unnecessary. There was no need to draft a document to spell out our unalienable rights, especially since the proposed bill of rights seemed more about establishing a framework for how the government would act in certain situations rather than spelling out rights natural citizens. Federalists were careful to explicitly state fundamental rights in a document that had to be ratified by the people, because it suggested that the source of our rights lies in the consent of the people rather than in nature. It therefore seemed to follow that the Anti-Federalists were suggesting that our rights depended on the declaration of those rights in a document rather than on their mere existence in nature..