Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.

And I'm Juan Dabalos. We are back with the Federalist today, lecture number three, the extended

republic. As we saw in the last lecture, those who opposed provisions of the

Constitution as drafted, collectively known as the anti-federalists, made some arguments about

why the Constitution was not the best means for preserving liberty and securing happiness.

Publius responds in Federalist 9 with an argument that the political science included in the Constitution or that

the Constitution is the product of looks back to the great civilizations of the past, to Greece

and Rome and improves on the things that they did well and eliminates their failures.

He talks about a couple different things that are pretty familiar

to American separation of power, representative government, an independent judiciary,

and the extended republic. Yeah, I think sometimes we forget how difficult it must have been at

the time to say, okay, we're going

to form a government.

What is the government going to look like?

Now we have the U.S. Constitution that we turn to, and we think that as the standard of what

a good government should look like.

But at the time, they didn't have anything.

Their examples come from ancient Rome in Greece, and they had started the Articles of

Confederation in 1776, but those weren't working too well because they were testing things out. They

were trying different forms of government, some that were making the legislatures too supreme,

but they had no power to actually enforce the loss that they were

passing. The Continental Congress had no coercive powers so that the states could follow the

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