1 ``I mean for the Union.''


FEDERALIST No. 16

The Same Subject Continued
(The Insufficiency of the Present Confederation to Preserve the
Union)
From the New York Packet.
Tuesday, December 4, 1787.

HAMILTON

To the People of the State of New York:
THE tendency of the principle of legislation for States, or
communities, in their political capacities, as it has been
exemplified by the experiment we have made of it, is equally
attested by the events which have befallen all other governments of
the confederate kind, of which we have any account, in exact
proportion to its prevalence in those systems. The confirmations of
this fact will be worthy of a distinct and particular examination.
I shall content myself with barely observing here, that of all the
confederacies of antiquity, which history has handed down to us, the
Lycian and Achaean leagues, as far as there remain vestiges of them,
appear to have been most free from the fetters of that mistaken
principle, and were accordingly those which have best deserved, and
have most liberally received, the applauding suffrages of political
writers.
This exceptionable principle may, as truly as emphatically, be
styled the parent of anarchy: It has been seen that delinquencies