MADISON'S STUDIES IN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT 167
Switzerland he used a Dictionnaire de Suisse,^ the account of Temple Stanyan, published in 1714, of which Dr. John- son said, " The Swiss admit that there is but one error in Stanyan," and Coxe's Sketches, which is praised by Free- man. The most serviceable description of the constitution of the Netherlands he found in Sir William Temple's Observa- tions. For Germany he relied upon Felice and upon Savage's History/. In addition to these studies it hardly needs to be said that Madison, like several of his contemporaries, had studied Aristotle's Politics and mastered Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, Of the last he made an abstract for Washing- ton's use prior to the convention, and Washington borrowed and copied with his own hand Madison's material on the history of federations.
The question naturally arises, what use did Madison make of these materials ? Turning to the journal of the conven- tion, we find that in his important speech of June 19 against Patterson's plan for revising the Articles of Confederation, he reviewed, as he says, "the Amphictyonic and Achtean Confederation among the ancients and the Helvetic, Ger- manic and Belgic among the moderns," tracing their analogy to the United States in the Constitution and extent of their federal authorities and in the tendency of the particular mem- bers to usurp on these authorities and to bring confusion and ruin upon the whole. Later, in the same speech, he showed by examples from the same history how vulnerable loose con- federacies were to foreign attack by intrigue.
Similarly, on June 28, he enforced his argument that the small States had nothing to fear from combinations of the large States, by appealing to the history of the Empire, where it was the "contentions, not the combinations, of Prussia and Austria that have distracted and oppressed the German Empire." In Nos. 18, 19, and 20 of The Federalist this material is again digested into a powerful argument against any form of government in which the sovereign authority deals with States rather than with individuals. The moral
1 Edited by V. B. Tscharner, Zurich, 1773.
