"common defense" is being used as an elision of "common defense of the People". The entire phrase is a noun phrase. But " defense" is a verb within the noun phrase.
At least, it is not a typo from ubernostrum, it's spelled "defence" in the original [1].
Moreover that's the British spelling of defense (is there a link with the lack of capital?).
Also note that, instead of "Blessings", it is "Bleſsings" in the original. But they are roughly equivalent if you apply a compatibility decomposition in your unicode normalization (NFKD/NFKC).
So where is the edit button for that constitution? Or do they only accept pull requests?
but at least in my browser, I can't see the actual answer (it says "2 Answers" but I can only see one, which just confirms that the word is not capitalized).
