The Bill of Rights is the name we give to the first ten amendments to our Constitution. These first ten amendments were necessary to convince 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. However, it has not been an easy road and there has been heated debate on both sides over whether or not it should be included. In this article I intend to make the case for the Federalists on why it was not necessary to include a Bill of Rights 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 that it would undermine the ideal that a government should have limited powers (377). The proposed legislation would run counter to the main point of a constitution written as the product of a social contract, which states that all power initially rests with citizens and that citizens build a government that has limited and enumerated powers. in a written constitution. For example, Federalists argued that deliberately stating that the right to religion should not be infringed could be misunderstood by people who think that if the Constitution had not specifically stated this restriction, then the government would have that power. In other words, Federalists feared that people might think that the Constitution gave the government unlimited power and that writing specific provisions into a bill of rights would only increase the sense that those only written rights were the only ones taken from a government that usually has unlimited power. This was obviously not what the authors... middle of the paper ......ce claim that every person in the country is afforded natural and inalienable rights only by virtue of the fact that they are human beings, then writing those rights back into a second document seemed unnecessary. There was no need to draft a document to assert our inalienable rights, especially since the proposed bill of rights seemed to be more about establishing a framework for how the government would act in certain situations rather than asserting rights. natural rights of citizens. Federalists were cautious about explicitly declaring 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 that the Anti-Federalists were suggesting that our rights depended on the declaration of those rights in a document rather than on their existence in nature..