Contrast this with the American Constitution and Bill of Rights which do not contain one statement or inference that the federal government has any responsibility, or power, to grant the people rights, privileges, or benefits of any kind. The total emphasis in these American documents is on telling the federal government what it cannot do to and for the people–on ordering the federal government to stay out of the private affairs of citizens and to leave their God-given rights alone.
This negative, restricted role of the federal government, and this assumption that God and not government is the source of man's rights and privileges, are clearly stated in the Preamble to our Constitution. The Preamble says that this Constitution is being ordained and established, not to grant liberties to the people, but to secure the liberties which the people already had (before the government was ever formed) as blessings.
The essence of the American constitutional system, which made freedom in a federal union possible, is clearly stated in the first sentence of the first Article of our Constitution and in the last Article (the Tenth Amendment) of our Bill of Rights.
The first Article of our Constitution begins with the phrase, "All legislative Powers herein granted...." That obviously meant the federal government had no powers which were not granted to it by the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment restates the same thing with emphasis:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Clearly and emphatically, our Constitution says that the federal government cannot legally do anything which is not authorized by a specific grant of power in the Constitution.
This is the one constitutional concept that made the American governmental system different from all others; it is the one which left our people so free and unmolested by their own government that they converted the backward, American continent into the land of freedom, the most fruitful and powerful nation in history.
And this was the constitutional proviso which created the American principle of federalism. The Constitution made no grant, or even inferred a grant, of power to the federal government for meddling, to any extent, or for any purpose whatever, in the private cultural, economic, social, educational, religious, or political affairs of individual citizens–or in the legitimate governmental activities of the individual states which became members of the federal union. Hence, states could join the federal union without sacrificing the freedom of their citizens.
Modern "liberalism" which has been continuously in control of the federal government (and of most opinion-forming institutions and media throughout our society) since Franklin D. Roosevelt's first inauguration, March 4, 1933, has, by ignoring constitutional restraints, changed our Federal government with limited powers into a Central government with limitless power over the individual states and their people.