“My countrymen, preserve your jealousy-reject suspicion, it is the fiend that destroys public and private happiness. I know some weak, but very few if any wicked men in public confidence.
And learn this most difficult and necessary lesson: That on the preservation of parties, public liberty depends. Whenever men are unanimous on great public questions, whenever there is but one party, freedom ceases and despotism commences.
The object of a free and wise people should be so to balance parties, that from the weakness of all you may be governed by the moderation of the combined judgments of the whole, not tyrannized over by the blind passions of a few individuals.”
John Francis Mercer (A [Maryland] Farmer), Anti-Federalist No. 10, “On the Preservation of Parties, Public Liberty Depends,” Maryland Gazette and Baltimore Advertiser, March 18, 1788
“America is at present divided into three classes or descriptions of men, and in a few years there will be but two.
“Even then the advantages and disadvantages of national government operated so strongly, although silently, on each individual, that the conflict was nearly equal.
“The old Congress was a national government and an union of States, both brought into one political body, as these opposite powers-I do not mean parties were so exactly blended and very nearly balanced, like every artificial, operative machine where action is equal to reaction.
“The only foreign, or at least evil foreign influence, must be obtained through corruption. Where the government is lodged in the body of the people, as in Switzerland, they can never be corrupted; for no prince, or people, can have resources enough to corrupt the majority of a nation; and if they could, the play is not worth the candle.
“If the body of the people will not govern themselves, and govern themselves well too, the consequence is unavoidable—a FEW will, and must govern them.
“That the people are not at present disposed for, and are actually incapable of, governments of simplicity and equal rights, I can no longer doubt. But whose fault is it? We make them bad, by bad governments, and then abuse and despise them for being so. Our people are capable of being made anything that human nature was or is capable of, if we would only have a little patience and give them good and wholesome institutions; but I see none such and very little prospect of such.”
“Many of us are proud, and are frequently disappointed that office confers neither respect or difference. No man of merit can ever be disgraced by office.
“That a national government will add to the dignity and increase the splendor of the United States abroad, can admit of no doubt: it is essentially requisite for both. That it will render government, and officers of government, more dignified at home is equally certain. That these objects are more suited to the manners, if not [the] genius and disposition of our people is, I fear, also true.”
“There are but two modes by which men are connected in society, the one which operates on individuals, this always has been, and ought still to be called, national government; the other which binds States and governments together (not corporations, for there is no considerable nation on earth, despotic, monarchical, or republican, that does not contain many subordinate corporations with various constitutions) this last has heretofore been denominated a league or confederacy. The term federalists is therefore improperly applied to themselves…”