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The Mayflower Compact: The First System Of Self Government

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Because of the monarchy that was offered in Great Britain, self-government was originally not a possibility. All of the British were ruled under one man, whoever the current king was at the time. However, when the first American colonists arrived in the new land, they created the Mayflower Compact, a document that recorded the first system of self-government introduced to the settlers. This system allowed normal citizens to rule over one another, which resulted in the power distributed evenly between every person. To illustrate, one sentence from the compact says, “Combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid.” This piece of evidence from the stated deed shows how the immigrants decided that it would be best if they combined themselves together to create a system of governing, …show more content…
Paine’s pamphlet was used in many ways to start a new country, his ideas the start of a new government. For example, one of the sections in the articles says, “…Being empowered by the people will have a truly legal authority.” This additional segment from Paine’s booklet explains a true, legal authority would be one that is empowered by the people. To summarize, the author is saying that the people is a necessity in a government to ensure that it will work, and all the power will be distributed among everyone. Accordingly, if the people do run the government, it would be considered self-government. Consequently, because people are governing themselves rather than one person governing everyone, then there would be no sort of monarchy that would be possible. As stated many paragraphs before, the monarchy of Great Britain was the main reason why the Colonies of America broke off from them, so it would only make sense to have a government with the opposite

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