Nothing is more striking in the debates of the convention than the distrust of its members, with few exceptions, of what they called "democracy." By this term they meant the power of the people to legislate directly and without the intervention of chosen representatives. They believed that the utmost concession that could be safely made to democracy was the power to select suitable men to legislate for the common good, and nothing is more striking in the Constitution than the care with which they sought to remove the powers of legislation from the _direct_ action of the people. Nowhere in the instrument is there a suggestion of the initiative or referendum. Even an amendment to the Constitution could not be directly proposed by the people in the exercise of their residual power or adopted by them. As previously said, it could only be proposed by two-thirds of the House and the Senate, and then could only become effective, if ratified by three-fourths of the States, acting, not by a popular vote, but through their chosen representatives either in their legislatures or special conventions. Thus they denied the power of a majority to alter even the form of government. Moreover, they gave to the President the power to nullify laws passed by a majority of the House and Senate by his simple veto, and yet, fearful of an unqualified power of the President in this respect, they provided that the veto itself should be vetoed, if two-thirds of the Senate and House concurred in such action. Moreover, the great limitations of the Constitution, which forbid the majority, or even the whole body of the House and Senate, to pass laws either for want of authority or because they impair fundamental rights of individuals, are as emphatic a negation of an absolute democracy as can be found in any form of government. Measured by present-day conventions of democracy, the Constitution is an undemocratic document. The framers believed in representative government, to which they gave the name "Republicanism" as the antithesis to "democracy." The members of the Senate were to be selected by State legislatures, and the President himself was, as originally planned, to be selected by an electoral college similar to the College of Cardinals. The debates are full of utterances which explain this attitude of mind. Mr. Gerry said: "The evils we experience flow from the excesses of democracy. The people are the dupes of pretended patriots." Mr. Randolph, the author of the Virginia plan, observed that the general object of the Constitution was to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States laboured; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the tribulation and follies of democracy; that some check, therefore, was to be sought for against this tendency of our Government. Alexander Hamilton remarked, on June 18, that--