Page:Back to the Republic.djvu/27

 yet the men who established our government made a very marked distinction between a republic and a democracy, gave very clear definitions of each term, and said repeatedly and emphatically that they had founded a republic.

Surely no one has more valid authority to use governmental terms, or to make definitions of those terms, than the men who evolved the best form of government the world has ever known. The statements of Hamilton and Madison, who were designated as the spokesmen and interpreters of the work of the Constitutional Convention, make it absolutely clear that the founders of the republic had in mind a very marked distinction between these two forms. In The Federalist Madison says:

"What, then, are the distinctive characters of the republican form? Were an answer to this to be sought, not by recurring to principles, but in the application of the term by political writers, to the constitutions of different states, no satisfactory one would ever be found. Holland, in which no particle of the supreme authority is derived from the people, has passed almost universally under the denomination of a republic. The same title has been bestowed on Venice, where absolute power over the great body of the people is exercised, in the most absolute manner, by a