The same process must be repeated in every
member of which the body is constituted; and the execution of the
plans framed by the councils of the whole, will always fluctuate on
the discretion of the ill-informed and prejudiced opinion of every
part. Those who have been conversant in the proceedings of popular
assemblies, who have seen how difficult it often is, when there is no
exterior pressure of circumstances, to bring them to harmonious
resolutions on important points, will readily conceive how impossible
it must be to induce a number of such assemblies, deliberating at a
distance from each other, at different times, and under different
impressions, long to cooperate in the same views and pursuits."
Over ten years of storm and stress with a congress that was, as John
Adams said, [Footnote: Ford, _op. cit._, p. 36.] "only a diplomatic
assembly," had furnished the leaders of the revolution "with an
instructive but afflicting lesson" [Footnote: _Federalist_, No. 15.]
in what happens when a number of self-centered communities
are entangled in the same environment. And so, when they went
to Philadelphia in May of 1787, ostensibly to revise the Articles of
Confederation, they were really in full reaction against the
fundamental premise of Eighteenth Century democracy. Not only
were the leaders consciously opposed to the democratic spirit of
the time, feeling, as Madison said, that "democracies have ever
been spectacles of turbulence and contention," but within the
national frontiers they were determined to offset as far as they could
the ideal of self-governing communities in self-contained environments.
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