"federalist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Alexander)

To the People of the State of New York:
THE three last numbers of this paper have been dedicated to an
enumeration of the dangers to which we should be exposed, in a state
of disunion, from the arms and arts of foreign nations. I shall now
proceed to delineate dangers of a different and, perhaps, still more
alarming kind--those which will in all probability flow from
dissensions between the States themselves, and from domestic
factions and convulsions. These have been already in some instances
slightly anticipated; but they deserve a more particular and more
full investigation.
A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously
doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or
only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which
they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with
each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests as an
argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are
ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of
harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties
in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course
of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience
of ages.
The causes of hostility among nations are innumerable. There
are some which have a general and almost constant operation upon the
collective bodies of society. Of this description are the love of
power or the desire of pre-eminence and dominion--the jealousy of
power, or the desire of equality and safety. There are others which
have a more circumscribed though an equally operative influence
within their spheres. Such are the rivalships and competitions of
commerce between commercial nations. And there are others, not less
numerous than either of the former, which take their origin entirely
in private passions; in the attachments, enmities, interests,
hopes, and fears of leading individuals in the communities of which
they are members. Men of this class, whether the favorites of a
king or of a people, have in too many instances abused the
confidence they possessed; and assuming the pretext of some public
motive, have not scrupled to sacrifice the national tranquillity to
personal advantage or personal gratification.
The celebrated Pericles, in compliance with the resentment of a
prostitute,1 at the expense of much of the blood and treasure of
his countrymen, attacked, vanquished, and destroyed the city of the
SAMNIANS. The same man, stimulated by private pique against the
MEGARENSIANS,2 another nation of Greece, or to avoid a
prosecution with which he was threatened as an accomplice of a
supposed theft of the statuary Phidias,3 or to get rid of the
accusations prepared to be brought against him for dissipating the
funds of the state in the purchase of popularity,4 or from a
combination of all these causes, was the primitive author of that
famous and fatal war, distinguished in the Grecian annals by the
name of the PELOPONNESIAN war; which, after various vicissitudes,