ple of America should enjoy peace, liberty, and safety; but that the Governments of the individual States, that particular municipal establishments, might enjoy a certain extent of power, and be arrayed with certain dignities and attributes of Sovereignty? We have heard of the impious doctrine in the Old World, that the People were made for kings, not kings for the People. Is the same doctrine to be revived in the New, in another shape, that the solid happiness of the People is to be sacrificed to the views of political institutions of a different form? It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the People, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of Government whatever has any other value, than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object. Were the plan of the Convention adverse to the public happiness, my voice would be, reject the plan. Were the Union itself inconsistent with the public happiness, it would be, abolish the Union. In like manner, as far as the sovereignty of the States cannot be reconciled to the happiness of the People, the voice of every good citizen must be, let the former be sacrificed to the latter. How far the sacrifice is necessary, has been shown. How far the unsacrificed residue will be endangered, is the question before us.
Several important considerations have been touched in the course of these papers, which discountenance the supposition, that the operation of the Fœderal Government will by degrees prove fatal to the State Governments. The more I revolve the subject, the more fully I am persuaded, that the balance is much more likely to be disturbed by the preponderancy of the last than of the first scale.
We have seen, in all the examples of ancient and modern Confederacies, the strongest tendency continually betraying itself in the members, to despoil the General
