Final ThoughtsWhen I started writing about general welfare, at first I thought it might be a two, three or maybe four part article, but it eventually turned into TEN and now eleven parts, and I still think it didn't cover everything I wanted. However, I was able to cover in many ways the various topics and circumstances surrounding the term “general well-being”. In the course of the discussion we covered some of its early origins and uses, how it came to be part of the Constitution, and the debates about it after the end of the Convention, until the Supreme Court began hearing arguments about it [ which is a whole other discussion in itself]. The focus here has not been what the Supreme Court thought of the term in Article I Section 8 Clause 1, but how others thought of it before and soon after it became law. Why it was used, and what its pedigree was for those who decided to put it in the Constitution, and how it was viewed by those who ratified it. In all these discussions, from the Articles of Confederation to the letters of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, few things become relatively obvious about the general welfare. Its origin is directly from the Articles of Confederation. In those articles, the term carried no weight of power, but was used to describe the purpose of the following powers. In the Convention of 1787 no debate on this term occurred. This is compared to the long debates over almost every other power granted in the Constitution. It is notable that this term is the medium of broad general power and is NOT up for debate, while other much less significant powers have created intense debate. This can only imply that it was never seen as a general power. Even at its most expansive... halfway through the document... d Constitution, although the diaries reflect the fact that he submitted one for examination. The draft used as a proposal was presented by Pinckney himself in 1818 years after the Convention, when future president John Quincy Adams attempted to collect and preserve all the information from the Convention itself. The fact that the Convention's limited documents detail his proposals calls into question the accuracy of the draft he presented compared to the one actually proposed on May 29, 1787, although James Wilson's notes discovered in the early 1900s tend to show much what he stated to be accurate.3 Encyclopedia BritannicaReferences:Articles of ConfederationConstitution of the United StatesConstitutions effective 1787 of; Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, New HampshireMax Farrands records the Convention