Oh, but they did. Not that it detracts from the force of your argument, with which I agree, but recall that in the previous essay Madison complains bitterly about the poor, deluded people of Rhode Island, captured by a populist rural movement that was blocking the ratification of the Constitution. Madison hoped that the institution of a Senate would provide a guard against that sort of thing. If it has, it isn't entirely obvious.
But I confess I am at a complete loss to account for the widespread conviction that Mr. 0bama is in any sense an intellectual. He hasn't a single intellectual accomplishment to his name: book, paper, theory, painting, sculpture, musical composition, philosophical treatise, nothing. The hyperbolic statement that he is secure in being the smartest individual in any room he walks into borders on the ludicrous and if true would be the greatest tragedy I could possibly imagine in the fellow's life. Inasmuch as at least some of those rooms reside at Columbia and Harvard I suspect that the converse is more likely to have been true, that he was, in fact, the stupidest person in the room including the janitor. That isn't a crime; I've been in that position frequently myself. But the complete lack of intellectual humility attendant to the claim leads me to believe it can't be true. If it were, it wouldn't need to be made.
Nevertheless, one can see why such luminaries as Marx, Lenin, and Mao are high in the pantheon of the Left. These truly were geniuses, but at only one thing: the accretion of political power. Not, obviously, at its use once acquired. The promised social justice turned to hideous oppression, the promised economic prosperity to squalor, the promised withered state to an enormous, murderous monster. The true believers on the Left hold to a man or woman that he or she could do it better given the chance, but no one ever has. But as far as the accretion of power, if that's what one is after, theirs is a very effective model to follow.
Hence the dependence on class warfare and the politics of resentment on the part of the radical Left. The smart ones know it's only a tool employed for the dominance of the cynical over the credulous. The rest actually believe the whole thing, despite three quarters of a century of disproof and countless millions of victims' testimony to the contrary. I think 0bama may be in the latter situation - having reached his goal of attaining power he is utterly hapless in its employment. It could be worse, much worse. He could be good at it.
Please see Post #10 for further points re the initial comment.
B4Ranch, you make a great point that at the time of America's founding, travel was difficult and time consuming. It would seem that the circulation of ideas would be so impaired that such an accumulation of knowledge as existed in America at that time might have been impossible. Yet, we know of its widespread existence in the minds of those generations because we can access the Founding generation's writings and speeches with ease, due to the technologies you mentioned.
Many years ago, research of their writings was difficult, because ordinary libraries and school libraries had removed such accounts from the shelves, and they could be found only in dusty stacks in remote areas of distant libraries. The progressive censors had done their work.
Today, they can be accessed from home with the click of a mouse. Divine Providence has left us without excuse!
We can read the Founders' words, their accounts of the historians and ancient writings they had consulted, and we can even access some of those ancient writers' works easily.
To B4Ranch's point, however, the Far Left in America, "educated" as they have been under the tutelage of professors who, themselves, never studied the ideas of liberty nor the roots of those ideas in what they would consider to be religious writings, are trapped, as it were, in their limited understanding, fitting into Eliot's definition of what he described as a new kind of provinciality.
>>But I confess I am at a complete loss to account for the widespread conviction that Mr. 0bama is in any sense an intellectual.<<
A man who doesn’t work with his hands or have an obvious skill yet is considered a success has to be an intellectual or so his admirers will insist.
For some time I have used the word "stupid" to brand the Democrat voters who continue to vote us into a financial abyss. But, these people are not stupid. They are smart in certain fields, but in politics they believe that intelligence continues to bloom with the same grace as it does in their professional fields. That assumption is their failing, along with our nation's.
The modern leftists are NOT stupid; but they are foolish and have elected an appropriate leader.
This Federalist, especially its beginning, angers me. The demise of the State-Appointed Senators paved the way for the total eradication of a principled Senate and all its power of checks and balances. It is now a useless essay.