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for every age followed. Madison warned that “those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.” Class warfare was always possible because of “the unequal distribution of property” and “interfering interests.” Likewise, enlightened statesmen would “not always be at the helm” to manage affairs. Madison’s answer to factionalism and conflict, like Hamilton’s but with deeper philosophical perception, turned on the proper structure and accepted routine of governmental operations.
    Neither Madison nor Hamilton had been completely happy with the Federal Constitution that emerged from the Convention, and both saw problems in its makeup. But they had been delegates together in Philadelphia, and the refining processes of debate and disagreement there had turned them into realists concerning what was possible. The experience had taught them how to reinforce each other’s arguments through separate and not always compatible lines of inquiry. They knew enough not to get in each other’s way. Here was the heart of the collaboration. Both men accepted the same larger predicament to be solved. How, in Madison’s words in “Federalist No. 37,” could one combine “the requisite stability and energy in government with the inviolable attention due to liberty and to the republican form” (p. 196)? Wouldn’t citizens always disagree about where that line should be drawn?
    The two major collaborators had different approaches, but Madison would answer these questions for both of them in the very next paper. He observed in “Federalist No. 38” that the legendary Greek lawgiver Solon “had not given to his countrymen the government best suited to their happiness, but most tolerable to their prejudices” (p. 202). Citizens could recognize their interests only through the customary forms available to them. The real question was whether those forms could be rearranged to serve the nation better. Expertise and artifice were needed. In “Federalist No. 51,” Madison would build the conflict of interests that he saw into the very structure of government by providing the separate branches of government “the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others.”
    Hamilton and Madison were always ahead of their opponents in the ideological battle over ratification, and they had schooled themselves in the moderating theory of human nature that all good government requires. “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” Madison opined in “Federalist No. 51.” That nature was fallen, but not without possibilities. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” Madison reasoned. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Alas, there were no angels, and human participants could not be expected to act like them anyway. A tougher, more realistic arrangement of “opposite and rival interests,” had to supply “the defect of better motives.” The “great difficulty” in this balancing process was also clear to both writers: “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself” (p. 288).
    How was this program of control to be managed? Technique would replace temperament. The guarded blend of pessimism and optimism in “Federalist No. 51” is one of the most endearing traits of Publius throughout the collaboration. Consider the qualifiers in his reply to the problem just stated: “Happily for the republican cause, the practicable sphere may be carried to a very great extent, by a judicious modification and mixture of the federal principle ” (p. 292). What was necessarily and crucially “practicable” in the design of government had to be ”judicious” and carried to a limited but “great extent” through “modification” and “mixture.” The