Willem Anthony Ockerse Quotes
The constitution would be based on the rights and duties of man and citizens; on civil liberty and equality; on popular sovereignty by representation; on an energetic and responsible executive government; on a fully unified administration … on the separation of church and state; and the right of the people to revise their own constitution.
The committee to draft the Dutch Constitution had met and agreed on a basis for the constitution they would write. However, they decided to run the basis past the General Assembly before they started drafting specific language. There was much enthusiasm for their basis although there were a number of more conservative delegates who would rather have seen the Orangist monarchy brought back. It is easy to see how the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights influenced the Dutch drafters even though the American Constitution was only 11 years old.
Willem Anthony Ockerse, 1760–1826, Dutch Reformed Pastor, Stock Broker, Author, Politician and Patriot Revolutionist, Declaration of what the Dutch Constitution would be based upon, Speech to the National Assembly, January 15, 1798
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Although Holland was more egalitarian and fairer than most nations of Europe, it was not quite as desirable as Diderot described it. He only visited a part of Holland that was the most educated and affluent.
Note the use of the phrase “against the government.” One of the unique aspects of the American Constitution and The Bill of Rights is that the government is considered a potential and even probable infringer on the liberties of the people. It is almost as though the government was the potential enemy. Modern libertarians state this very explicitly and it is ever present in the views of both the right and left wings of American politics. Most centrists recoil at the thought that some citizens see the government as the enemy, but even in America there have been times where the government has infringed on the rights of citizens only to have the courts or future administrations and Congresses correct the error.
This is probably the first known use of the Bill of Rights phrase in the English language. For the earliest American use, see Edward Rutledge.
Most of the states would not ratify the proposed 1787 constitution as it was. Congress then added a version of what became known as the Bill of Rights in order to obtain the required concurrence of the people. Most scholars look at the 1787 Constitution and observe how little trust it had in the men who would rule and implement it. However, the people in general were even more skeptical than the intellectual leaders who drafted the Constitution and wanted even more assurances. Many people believed that most of the issues in the Bill of Rights were either implicit in the original 1787 draft or were unnecessary to spell out, but Congress had to sell the Constitution to the people as a whole and it took some very specific text to get people to believe that their rights would be protected.
Hayward claimed that Wilson was the first American President who ever criticized the American Constitution. Many do not agree as Madison and Jefferson in part, along with most other Americans, found the Constitution so wanting that it was ratified only on condition of the passage of the Bill of Rights. Jackson, was distressed by the limitations on the President and many others had their objections, but Wilson, before he became a politician was a prominent academic political scientist and wrote voluminously and had an intellectual following so his criticism was not considered so “political” as others.
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