The Federalist Papers

Madison offers a survey of the unique challenges faced by the Constitutional Convention in drafting the document under proposal for ratification. The first challenge lay in “combining the requisite stability and energy in government, with the inviolable attention due to liberty and to the republican form” (178). For example, a balance needed to be struck between longer electoral terms of office, which support stability, and shorter electoral terms, which support liberty.

Equally challenging was the balance between the powers invested in the federal government versus state governments. Similar conflicts arose when reaching a compromise between what is best for large states and what is best for small states. Set against all this is the broader challenge of imprecise language, both in a general sense and in a legal sense, given that modern conventions of the law are still being settled in nations as old as Great Britain.

Madison compares the country to a sick patient who, after consulting the best physicians, is given a prescribed treatment. Numerous critics, though they do not doubt the seriousness of the disease, emerge to label that treatment a poison. However, these critics do not have a consistent alternative remedy to offer. Rather, Madison writes, they cannot even agree on what must change about the remedy.