>FEDERALIST No. 19 (Hamilton and Madison)                      .



The Same Subject Continued

(The Insufficiency of the Present Confederation to Preserve the

 Union)

For the Independent Journal.



HAMILTON AND MADISON



To the People of the State of New York:

THE examples of ancient confederacies, cited in my last paper,

 have not exhausted the source of experimental instruction on this

 subject. There are existing institutions, founded on a similar

 principle, which merit particular consideration. The first which

 presents itself is the Germanic body.

In the early ages of Christianity, Germany was occupied by seven

 distinct nations, who had no common chief. The Franks, one of the

 number, having conquered the Gauls, established the kingdom which

 has taken its name from them. In the ninth century Charlemagne, its

 warlike monarch, carried his victorious arms in every direction;

 and Germany became a part of his vast dominions. On the

 dismemberment, which took place under his sons, this part was

 erected into a separate and independent empire. Charlemagne and his

 immediate descendants possessed the reality, as well as the ensigns

 and dignity of imperial power. But the principal vassals, whose

 fiefs had become hereditary, and who composed the national diets

 which Charlemagne had not abolished, gradually threw off the yoke

 and advanced to sovereign jurisdiction and independence. The force

 of imperial sovereignty was insufficient to restrain such powerful

 dependants; or to preserve the unity and tranquillity of the empire.

 The most furious private wars, accompanied with every species of

 calamity, were carried on between the different princes and states.

 The imperial authority, unable to maintain the public order,

 declined by degrees till it was almost extinct in the anarchy, which

 agitated the long interval between the death of the last emperor of

 the Suabian, and the accession of the first emperor of the Austrian

 lines. In the eleventh century the emperors enjoyed full

 sovereignty: In the fifteenth they had little more than the symbols

 and decorations of power.

Out of this feudal system, which has itself many of the

 important features of a confederacy, has grown the federal system

 which constitutes the Germanic empire. Its powers are vested in a

 diet representing the component members of the confederacy; in the

 emperor, who is the executive magistrate, with a negative on the

 decrees of the diet; and in the imperial chamber and the aulic

 council, two judiciary tribunals having supreme jurisdiction in

 controversies which concern the empire, or which happen among its

 members.

The diet possesses the general power of legislating for the

 empire; of making war and peace; contracting alliances; assessing

 quotas of troops and money; constructing fortresses; regulating

 coin; admitting new members; and subjecting disobedient members to

 the ban of the empire, by which the party is degraded from his

 sovereign rights and his possessions forfeited. The members of the

 confederacy are expressly restricted from entering into compacts

 prejudicial to the empire; from imposing tolls and duties on their

 mutual intercourse, without the consent of the emperor and diet;

 from altering the value of money; from doing injustice to one

 another; or from affording assistance or retreat to disturbers of

 the public peace. And the ban is denounced against such as shall

 violate any of these restrictions. The members of the diet, as

 such, are subject in all cases to be judged by the emperor and diet,

 and in their private capacities by the aulic council and imperial

 chamber.

The prerogatives of the emperor are numerous. The most

 important of them are: his exclusive right to make propositions to

 the diet; to negative its resolutions; to name ambassadors; to

 confer dignities and titles; to fill vacant electorates; to found

 universities; to grant privileges not injurious to the states of

 the empire; to receive and apply the public revenues; and

 generally to watch over the public safety. In certain cases, the

 electors form a council to him. In quality of emperor, he possesses

 no territory within the empire, nor receives any revenue for his

 support. But his revenue and dominions, in other qualities,

 constitute him one of the most powerful princes in Europe.

From such a parade of constitutional powers, in the

 representatives and head of this confederacy, the natural

 supposition would be, that it must form an exception to the general

 character which belongs to its kindred systems. Nothing would be

 further from the reality. The fundamental principle on which it

 rests, that the empire is a community of sovereigns, that the diet

 is a representation of sovereigns and that the laws are addressed to

 sovereigns, renders the empire a nerveless body, incapable of

 regulating its own members, insecure against external dangers, and

 agitated with unceasing fermentations in its own bowels.

The history of Germany is a history of wars between the emperor

 and the princes and states; of wars among the princes and states

 themselves; of the licentiousness of the strong, and the oppression

 of the weak; of foreign intrusions, and foreign intrigues; of

 requisitions of men and money disregarded, or partially complied

 with; of attempts to enforce them, altogether abortive, or attended

 with slaughter and desolation, involving the innocent with the

 guilty; of general inbecility, confusion, and misery.

In the sixteenth century, the emperor, with one part of the

 empire on his side, was seen engaged against the other princes and

 states. In one of the conflicts, the emperor himself was put to

 flight, and very near being made prisoner by the elector of Saxony.

 The late king of Prussia was more than once pitted against his

 imperial sovereign; and commonly proved an overmatch for him.

 Controversies and wars among the members themselves have been so

 common, that the German annals are crowded with the bloody pages

 which describe them. Previous to the peace of Westphalia, Germany

 was desolated by a war of thirty years, in which the emperor, with

 one half of the empire, was on one side, and Sweden, with the other

 half, on the opposite side. Peace was at length negotiated, and

 dictated by foreign powers; and the articles of it, to which

 foreign powers are parties, made a fundamental part of the Germanic

 constitution.

If the nation happens, on any emergency, to be more united by

 the necessity of self-defense, its situation is still deplorable.

 Military preparations must be preceded by so many tedious

 discussions, arising from the jealousies, pride, separate views, and

 clashing pretensions of sovereign bodies, that before the diet can

 settle the arrangements, the enemy are in the field; and before the

 federal troops are ready to take it, are retiring into winter

 quarters.

The small body of national troops, which has been judged

 necessary in time of peace, is defectively kept up, badly paid,

 infected with local prejudices, and supported by irregular and

 disproportionate contributions to the treasury.

The impossibility of maintaining order and dispensing justice

 among these sovereign subjects, produced the experiment of dividing

 the empire into nine or ten circles or districts; of giving them an

 interior organization, and of charging them with the military

 execution of the laws against delinquent and contumacious members.

 This experiment has only served to demonstrate more fully the

 radical vice of the constitution. Each circle is the miniature

 picture of the deformities of this political monster. They either

 fail to execute their commissions, or they do it with all the

 devastation and carnage of civil war. Sometimes whole circles are

 defaulters; and then they increase the mischief which they were

 instituted to remedy.

We may form some judgment of this scheme of military coercion

 from a sample given by Thuanus. In Donawerth, a free and imperial

 city of the circle of Suabia, the Abb 300 de St. Croix enjoyed

 certain immunities which had been reserved to him. In the exercise

 of these, on some public occasions, outrages were committed on him

 by the people of the city. The consequence was that the city was

 put under the ban of the empire, and the Duke of Bavaria, though

 director of another circle, obtained an appointment to enforce it.

 He soon appeared before the city with a corps of ten thousand

 troops, and finding it a fit occasion, as he had secretly intended

 from the beginning, to revive an antiquated claim, on the pretext

 that his ancestors had suffered the place to be dismembered from his

 territory,1 he took possession of it in his own name, disarmed,

 and punished the inhabitants, and reannexed the city to his domains.

It may be asked, perhaps, what has so long kept this disjointed

 machine from falling entirely to pieces? The answer is obvious:

 The weakness of most of the members, who are unwilling to expose

 themselves to the mercy of foreign powers; the weakness of most of

 the principal members, compared with the formidable powers all

 around them; the vast weight and influence which the emperor

 derives from his separate and heriditary dominions; and the

 interest he feels in preserving a system with which his family pride

 is connected, and which constitutes him the first prince in Europe;

 --these causes support a feeble and precarious Union; whilst the

 repellant quality, incident to the nature of sovereignty, and which

 time continually strengthens, prevents any reform whatever, founded

 on a proper consolidation. Nor is it to be imagined, if this

 obstacle could be surmounted, that the neighboring powers would

 suffer a revolution to take place which would give to the empire the

 force and preeminence to which it is entitled. Foreign nations have

 long considered themselves as interested in the changes made by

 events in this constitution; and have, on various occasions,

 betrayed their policy of perpetuating its anarchy and weakness.

If more direct examples were wanting, Poland, as a government

 over local sovereigns, might not improperly be taken notice of. Nor

 could any proof more striking be given of the calamities flowing

 from such institutions. Equally unfit for self-government and

 self-defense, it has long been at the mercy of its powerful

 neighbors; who have lately had the mercy to disburden it of one

 third of its people and territories.

The connection among the Swiss cantons scarcely amounts to a

 confederacy; though it is sometimes cited as an instance of the

 stability of such institutions.

They have no common treasury; no common troops even in war; no

 common coin; no common judicatory; nor any other common mark of

 sovereignty.

They are kept together by the peculiarity of their topographical

 position; by their individual weakness and insignificancy; by the

 fear of powerful neighbors, to one of which they were formerly

 subject; by the few sources of contention among a people of such

 simple and homogeneous manners; by their joint interest in their

 dependent possessions; by the mutual aid they stand in need of, for

 suppressing insurrections and rebellions, an aid expressly

 stipulated and often required and afforded; and by the necessity of

 some regular and permanent provision for accomodating disputes among

 the cantons. The provision is, that the parties at variance shall

 each choose four judges out of the neutral cantons, who, in case of

 disagreement, choose an umpire. This tribunal, under an oath of

 impartiality, pronounces definitive sentence, which all the cantons

 are bound to enforce. The competency of this regulation may be

 estimated by a clause in their treaty of 1683, with Victor Amadeus

 of Savoy; in which he obliges himself to interpose as mediator in

 disputes between the cantons, and to employ force, if necessary,

 against the contumacious party.

So far as the peculiarity of their case will admit of comparison

 with that of the United States, it serves to confirm the principle

 intended to be established. Whatever efficacy the union may have

 had in ordinary cases, it appears that the moment a cause of

 difference sprang up, capable of trying its strength, it failed.

 The controversies on the subject of religion, which in three

 instances have kindled violent and bloody contests, may be said, in

 fact, to have severed the league. The Protestant and Catholic

 cantons have since had their separate diets, where all the most

 important concerns are adjusted, and which have left the general

 diet little other business than to take care of the common bailages.

That separation had another consequence, which merits attention.

 It produced opposite alliances with foreign powers: of Berne, at

 the head of the Protestant association, with the United Provinces;

 and of Luzerne, at the head of the Catholic association, with

 France.

PUBLIUS.

1 Pfeffel, ``Nouvel Abreg. Chronol. de l'Hist., etc.,

 d'Allemagne,'' says the pretext was to indemnify himself for the

 expense of the expedition.





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