THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FEDERALIST 117
two. According to his own process of weighing evidence, Hamilton's authority is shown at most to be only twice as good as Madison's, and perhaps only half as good.^ If the scale was evenly balanced before, it must turn now, for the very case used by Mr. Lodge to show that Madison's testi- mony was less trustworthy than Hamilton's memorandum, when examined in the light of Madison's collected material, proves that Madison's statement was accurate to the letter and that Hamilton's rested on a natural misapprehension.
Let us turn now to the more difficult problem presented by Nos. 49-58, 62, and 63. In regard to the series 49-58, an ingenious attempt to reconcile Hamilton's list with Madison's was made in the suggestion that as Hamilton made a mistake of a single figure in attributing 54 to Jay instead of 64, it was not improbable that he made a similar mistake in the next line and wrote 37-48 instead of 37-58.2 The value of this conjecture must depend upon the tendency of the inter- nal evidence.
If one examines the structure of The Federalist^ there seems to be a somewhat systematic division of labor in the preparation of its parts. Jay's few contributions deal with foreign relations, with which he was especially conversant; three distinctively historical papers, like 18, 19, and 20, come from Madison's hand because his studies in the history of federal government had supplied him with ampler materials. With these exceptions, all of the first part of The Federalist^ issued originally as the first volume, deals with general ques- tions emphasizing the defects of the Confederacy and the value of a more perfect union, and of these papers Hamilton wrote all but two. To him these were congenial topics, and he could throw into their discussion his whole force without reserve. As the originator of the essays, he could naturally choose for himself the particular part of the work he preferred
1 Following Mr. Lodge's example we might count Hamilton's assertion of joint authorship of 18, 19, and 20 as "errors," and raise his number of " errors" to eight.
2 See The Historical Magazine, VIII, 306.
