Free American Experiment by James MacGregor Burns Page A

unify the papers, but the trio were all too busy for this. He wisely chose Jay, still Secretary of Foreign Affairs, to write on foreign policy, Madison to philosophize on the shape and structure of the new government, and himself to demonstrate the inadequacies of the Confederation—a subject on which Hamilton viewed himself as an expert.
    The authors wrote in secrecy, using the benign pseudonym “Publius”; Washington was one of the few to know something about the authorship. Throughout the late fall and winter of 1787-88 the papers appeared in the New York Packet on Tuesdays and Fridays and in the Independent Journal Wednesdays and Saturdays. Another newspaper ran some of the essays, but dropped the series after anti-Federalists aroused pressure from subscribers. So avidly were the essays sought after by “politicians and persons of every description,” the publishers John and Archibald McLean reported, that they issued a collected edition in March 1788, long before the end of the struggle over ratification.
    Not even the enthusiastic McLeans could guess that a later publisher would be able to say with good reason that the Federalist was “America’s greatest contribution to political philosophy.” What attracted attention to the papers even at the time was the enlarged vision and the sophisticated analysis that the authors brought to their pitch for the new system. Although the essayists—especially Madison—drew heavily on their own earlier writings, they seemed to grow intellectually as they struck off the papers, sometimes as the printer waited impatiently.
    Madison obviously liked his own earlier comments about the human tendency of liberty toward factionalism; the need nonetheless to protect liberty and find some other way to curb faction, which was sown in the very nature of man; the many varieties of faction, including the frivolous but most of all the economic (“the various and unequal distribution of property”). He contended still that the causes of faction could not be removed, and hence the only remedy was to control its effects , and that this could be accomplished by submerging factions in a wider sphere—namely, under a new, strong, national government. These ideas appeared in the 10th paper.
    But Madison went far beyond his earlier writings intellectually in facing the supreme dilemma—the possibility that powerful factions, whether minority or majority, might capture the new national government just as they had come close to dominating state governments. No one has ever described the ultimate remedy—separation of House, Senate, executive, and judiciary, with each branch responsible to its own unique, competing constituency—as cogently and compellingly as Madison did in the 51st paper. “To what expedient then,” he asked after a long survey of the dilemma, “shall we finally resort for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government, as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.” Each department must be as separate as possible, with a will of its own. Then came the imperishable words:
    “But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defence must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be areflection on human nature, that such devices should be