FReeper Book Club: The Debate over the Constitution, Federalist #20

The authors finish with a lesson about the Netherlands and then sum up the previous papers, tying them to America’s situation.

² The United Netherlands are a confederacy of republics, or rather of aristocracies of a very remarkable texture, yet confirming all the lessons derived from those which we have already reviewed.

³ The union is composed of seven coequal and sovereign states, and each state or province is a composition of equal and independent cities.

⁴ In all important cases, not only the provinces, but the cities, must be unanimous.

⁵ The sovereignty of the union is represented by the States-General, consisting usually of about fifty deputies appointed by the provinces.

⁶ They hold their seats, some for life, some for six, three and one years; from two provinces they continue in appointment during pleasure.

⁷ The States-General have authority to enter into treaties and alliances, to make war and peace, to raise armies and equip fleets, to ascertain quotas and demand contributions.

⁸ In all these cases, however, unanimity and the sanction of their constituents are requisite.

⁹ They have authority to appoint and receive ambassadors, to execute treaties and alliances already formed, to provide for the collection of duties on imports and exports, to regulate the mint with a saving to the provincial rights, to govern as sovereigns the dependent territories.

¹⁰ The provinces are restrained, unless with the general consent, from entering into foreign treaties, from establishing imposts injurious to others, or charging their neighbors with higher duties than their own subjects.

¹¹ A council of state, a chamber of accounts with five colleges of admiralty, aid and fortify the federal administration.

¹² The executive magistrate of the union is the stadtholder, who is now an hereditary prince.

¹³ His principal weight and influence in the republic are derived from this independent title, from his great patrimonial estates, from his family connections with some of the chief potentates of Europe, and, more than all perhaps, from his being stadtholder in the several provinces as well as for the union, in which provincial quality he has the appointment of town magistrates under certain regulations, executes provincial decrees, presides when he pleases in the provincial tribunals, and has throughout the power of pardon.

¹⁴ As stadtholder of the union, he has, however, considerable prerogatives.

¹⁵ In his political capacity, he has authority to settle disputes between the provinces when other methods fail, to assist at the deliberations of the States-General, and at their particular conferences to give audiences to foreign ambassadors, and to keep agents for his particular affairs at foreign courts.

¹⁶ In his military capacity, he commands the federal troops, provides for garrisons, and in general regulates military affairs, disposes of all appointments from colonels to ensigns, and of the governments and posts of fortified towns.

¹⁷ In his marine capacity, he is admiral-general and superintends and directs every thing relative to naval forces and other naval affairs, presides in the admiralties in person or by proxy, appoints lieutenant-admirals and other officers, and establishes councils of war whose sentences are not executed till he approves them.

²⁰ Such is the nature of the celebrated Belgic Confederacy as delineated on parchment.

²² Imbecility in the government, discord among the provinces, foreign influence and indignities, a precarious existence in peace, and peculiar calamities from war.

²³ It was long ago remarked by Grotius that nothing but the hatred of his countrymen to the house of Austria kept them from being ruined by the vices of their constitution.

²⁴ The union of Utrecht, says another respectable writer, reposes an authority in the States-General seemingly sufficient to secure harmony, but the jealousy in each province renders the practice very different from the theory.

²⁵ The same instrument, says another, obliges each province to levy certain contributions, but this article never could, and probably never will, be executed because the inland provinces, who have little commerce, cannot pay an equal quota.

²⁶ In matters of contribution, it is the practice to waive the articles of the constitution.

²⁷ The danger of delay obliges the consenting provinces to furnish their quotas without waiting for the others, and then to obtain reimbursement from the others by deputations which are frequent or otherwise, as they can.

²⁸ The great wealth and influence of the province of Holland enable her to effect both these purposes.

²⁹ It has more than once happened that the deficiencies had to be ultimately collected at the point of the bayonet, a thing practicable, though dreadful, in a confederacy where one of the members exceeds in force all the rest and where several of them are too small to meditate resistance, but utterly impracticable in one composed of members, several of which are equal to each other in strength and resources, and equal singly to a vigorous and persevering defense.

³⁰ Foreign ministers, says Sir William Temple, who was himself a foreign minister, elude matters taken ad referendum by tampering with the provinces and cities.

³³ In critical emergencies, the States-General are often compelled to overleap their constitutional bounds.

³⁵ The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, by which their independence was formerly and finally recognized, was concluded without the consent of Zealand.

³⁶ Even as recently as the last treaty of peace with Great Britain, the constitutional principle of unanimity was departed from.

³⁷ A weak constitution must necessarily terminate in dissolution for want of proper powers or the usurpation of powers requisite for the public safety.

³⁸ Whether the usurpation, when once begun, will stop at the salutary point or go forward to the dangerous extreme, must depend on the contingencies of the moment.

³⁹ Tyranny has perhaps oftener grown out of the assumptions of power called for on pressing exigencies by a defective constitution, than out of the full exercise of the largest constitutional authorities.

⁴⁰ Notwithstanding the calamities produced by the stadtholdership, it has been supposed that without his influence in the individual provinces, the causes of anarchy manifest in the confederacy would long ago have dissolved it.

⁴¹ “Under such a government,” says the Abbe Mably, “the Union could never have subsisted, if the provinces had not a spring within themselves, capable of quickening their tardiness, and compelling them to the same way of thinking. This spring is the stadtholder.”

⁴² It is remarked by Sir William Temple, “that in the intermissions of the stadtholdership, Holland, by her riches and her authority, which drew the others into a sort of dependence, supplied the place.”

⁴³ These are not the only circumstances which have controlled the tendency to anarchy and dissolution.

⁴⁴ The surrounding powers impose an absolute necessity of union to a certain degree at the same time that they nourish by their intrigues the constitutional vices which keep the republic in some degree always at their mercy.

⁴⁵ The true patriots have long bewailed the fatal tendency of these vices and have made no less than four regular experiments by extraordinary assemblies convened for the special purpose to apply a remedy.

⁴⁶ As many times has their laudable zeal found it impossible to unite the public councils in reforming the known, the acknowledged, the fatal evils of the existing constitution.

⁴⁷ Let us pause, my fellow citizens, for one moment over this melancholy and monitory lesson of history, and with the tear that drops for the calamities brought on mankind by their adverse opinions and selfish passions, let our gratitude mingle an ejaculation to Heaven for the propitious concord which has distinguished the consultations for our political happiness.

⁴⁸ A design was also conceived of establishing a general tax to be administered by the federal authority.

⁵⁰ This unhappy people seem to be now suffering from popular convulsions, from dissensions among the states, and from the actual invasion of foreign arms, the crisis of their destiny.

⁵² The first wish prompted by humanity is that this severe trial may issue in such a revolution of their government as will establish their union and render it the parent of tranquillity, freedom and happiness; the next, that the asylum under which, we trust, the enjoyment of these blessings will speedily be secured in this country, may receive and console them for the catastrophe of their own.

⁵³ I make no apology for having dwelt so long on the contemplation of these federal precedents.

⁵⁴ Experience is the oracle of truth, and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred.

⁵⁵ The important truth which it unequivocally pronounces in the present case is that a sovereignty over sovereigns, a government over governments, a legislation for communities as contradistinguished from individuals, as it is a solecism in theory, so in practice it is subversive of the order and ends of civil polity by substituting violence in place of law, or the destructive coercion of the sword in place of the mild and salutary coercion of the magistracy.

It is now 11 December 1787, and having produced six sweeping papers in roughly ten days, Hamilton and Madison wrap up their extended historical exposition on political theory. Their last example is the present government of the Netherlands, and they leave the reader with a plea for a resolution in that country. They would get one not entirely to their liking, courtesy of a Corsican named Napoleon who was, at the time of this writing, a lieutenant of artillery. There will be more of that after examining their case.

² The United Netherlands are a confederacy of republics, or rather of aristocracies of a very remarkable texture, yet confirming all the lessons derived from those which we have already reviewed.

A remarkable texture and a remarkable history. This was, after all, the country that had fought the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs for eighty years to claim its independence. It had founded the first great capitalist empire shortly thereafter, contending with the British, their frequent allies and just as often their rivals, for supremacy on the high seas, and colonizing Africa, Asia and North America along the way. It had traded claims to lands in Suriname for British possession of an obscure Dutch trading post named New Amsterdam that became the New York in which these papers were published.

Hamilton’s and Madison’s characterization of that country is a snapshot of some of the last vestiges of the Old World before it became inundated in late 18th Century political enthusiasms. In describing its government they deliberately emphasize certain characteristics that were remarkably similar to those of existing government in America at the time, and similar as well to its future in the proposed Constitution they were defending.

⁵ The sovereignty of the union is represented by the States-General, consisting usually of about fifty deputies appointed by the provinces.

⁷ The States-General have authority to enter into treaties and alliances, to make war and peace, to raise armies and equip fleets, to ascertain quotas and demand contributions.

¹² The executive magistrate of the union is the stadtholder, who is now an hereditary prince.

This stadtholder was William V, Prince of Orange, and in fact he was the first hereditary successor to the position; he would also be its last. One sees in 15 through 18 his executive powers, in the respects enumerated not all that different from those proposed for the new American President. It is a nice, if rather loose parallel, at least on paper. Then Hamilton and Madison lower the boom.

²⁰ Such is the nature of the celebrated Belgic Confederacy as delineated on parchment.

²² Imbecility in the government, discord among the provinces, foreign influence and indignities, a precarious existence in peace, and peculiar calamities from war.

It is a description as merciless as that of the Swiss cantons in the previous paper. The problem appears to the authors as systemic, a constitution flawed enough to ruin the Dutch by itself were it not for the hatred of malign foreign influences.

²³ It was long ago remarked by Grotius that nothing but the hatred of his countrymen to the house of Austria kept them from being ruined by the vices of their constitution.

The reference is to the Dutch thinker Hugo de Groot, Latinized to Grotius, one of the seminal intellects behind all modern diplomacy and international law. His disparaging view of his countrymen was written fully a century and a half before the fix the Dutch now found themselves in. That was, according to Madison and Hamilton, a result of provincial rivalry that weakened the unitary voice of the Dutch, which was a consequence of: first, the insufficient centralization of power in terms of taxation (25), and second, the ability to enforce the decisions of the States-General upon the more powerful provinces, which tended to disregard them (26) unless motivated to respect them at bayonet point (29).

That is the first of Madison’s and Hamilton’s objections to this political arrangement. The second is not long in arriving. It is the vulnerability of such a contentious arrangement to foreign meddling (30). Then the third, which was that the weakness of this constitution forced the States-General to exceed their authority if the nation were to survive (33). The reason is the point to which the authors have been leading.

³⁷ A weak constitution must necessarily terminate in dissolution for want of proper powers or the usurpation of powers requisite for the public safety.

It is an oblique shot at the critics of the proposed Constitution, who were concentrating their efforts at pointing out the potential for abuse that lay in that document. The danger, in the authors’ estimation, lay more urgently at the feet of too weak a Constitution than it did at one too strong.

The case of the Dutch was a contemporary example that Madison and Hamilton chose to close with, one still very much in flux at the time. It would continue until the current stadtholder, William V, would be run out of the country by his own set of rebels who named themselves Patriots, the brief experiment of aristocracy over hard-headed capitalists concluded by a sinecure in Britain and a lamentation that they never really did properly understand him. Thus the Enlightenment rush toward representative government and empowerment of the individual citizen would surge in the Low Countries and recede until it reached a sad ebb tide at the hands of a puppet government provided by Napoleon. That would be, if anything, an unhappy vindication of Madison’s and Hamilton’s case although only the former would live to see it.

⁵⁵ The important truth which it unequivocally pronounces in the present case is that a sovereignty over sovereigns, a government over governments, a legislation for communities as contradistinguished from individuals, as it is a solecism in theory, so in practice it is subversive of the order and ends of civil polity by substituting violence in place of law, or the destructive coercion of the sword in place of the mild and salutary coercion of the magistracy.

This is, rather than a summation within this article, an independent point that Hamilton had made earlier in Federalist #15 (46). Often maligned as a statist interested only in the accumulation and centralization of power, he states it in terms abstract enough for the modern reader to misconstrue. It is simply that Hamilton has a deep conviction that a central government that cannot deal directly with the citizen, but must do so through the auspices of an intermediary such as a state government, must at last do so through brute coercion rather than the rule of law.

It is a point that modern critics, mindful of the furious contention for power between state and federal government that led to the American Civil War, tend to misinterpret, and is not in fact the position that many of them normally associate with Hamilton.

The reader comes now to the conclusion of the six parts of the early December Federalists and finds himself in the difficult position of attempting a summation of what was itself a summation. Bearing in mind the inevitable oversimplifications, these points stand out.

Thus was the case for a federal construction in which power would be centralized under law, lest it be lost to those for whom it was centralized under force. It was a system opposed to tyranny that could still lead to a tyrant; a defense of individual rights that could still be turned toward their usurpation. The need for such a potential monster seemed to be adequately justified by history; how best to control it such that it did not eat the hands that fed it was about to take center stage.

Like the United Netherlands, the US under the Articles had no power to enforce its authority to receive taxes from the states. The Netherlands more than once resorted to “the point of a bayonet” to force payment.

We were headed for a similar situation as the Virginia House of Delegates discussed in 1784 a measure that would enable Congress to force payment by delinquent states through the use of armed force. It was a bad idea and never passed, but it is illustrative of the awful situation we were in.

Your bump hit the evening crowd.

The unanimous votes on some issues is interesting. Heck, we can’t even agree on a language or a border.

In #23 we see how the nation sustained itself because of concerns of its foreign enemies. Now we have an administration who believes our greatest enemy is their internal political rivals. That was done for party power, at the cost of national security.

Amazing.

Oh, we agree on the border. We disagree (we are told) on how border control is exercised, although this poll shows something different.

Do you support Arizona’s new law on illegal immigration?
Yes, the law needs to be expanded nationwide.
61 73.5%
Yes, we need to protect our borders.
22 26.5%
In theory, but parts of the law are vague and should be made more specific.
0 0%
No, the new law will result in racial profiling.
0 0%
No, as a nation of immigrants, we have no right to restrict access.
0 0%

Number of Voters : 83
First Vote : Tuesday, 18 May 2010 18:12
Last Vote : Tuesday, 18 May 2010 18:22

As in my previous comment, it’s a poor analogy. Europe’s problems stemmed from the desire of men to lord it over others. The saddest part is that so many of them seem to take pleasure in being lorded over.

It isn’t a supposed spirit or enlightenment that distinguishes successful people from losers. It’s the knowledge that they can tolerate privations and that they can produce what they need without interference from others. Colonists were resourceful people in a nation of ample resources. They either traveled to America or their families traveled in recent memory. The trip was a life or death struggle which ended in a forest where a second life or death struggle began.

They fought off the natives and the French. They built cities and comfortable lives for themselves in places that previously supported hunter-gatherers. It must have been something to look at a wild forest and know that if you could till the land, you could have it. It led to the inexorable question among colonists who regarded England’s attempts at control with the question, “What do we need you for?”

Over time, this belief transported to the west, to California, and to Alaska and Hawaii, even to The Philippines. For two centuries it served as the base to keep busybodies in check - “I don’t need you to tell me what to do.” It was the thesis for Atlas Shrugged. Many of Europe’s greatest failures spring not from the wellhead of men who insisted, “You do need us to tell you what to do,” but from the fools who believed them. The most common question about National Socialism and Soviet Communism is, “Why did they let them do it?” In part, it was because the many were disarmed by the few, but it was the many who allowed that to happen.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.