England serves as a recurring comparative setting in The Federalist, not as the subject of a continuous narrative. Its history and institutions are invoked to show how political unity can coordinate military and commercial resources, how rivalry among neighboring peoples can undermine common interests, and how particular English legal arrangements bear on constitutional design. The comparisons range from the imagined disunity of the British parts to details of courts and protections for liberty; their force lies in connecting concrete institutional examples to arguments about union, federal government, and the limits of borrowing from another political system.

England and the Case for Political Union

The British example makes the argument for coordination tangible. The text asks readers to imagine English, Scottish, and Welsh militias each obeying a separate government at the moment of invasion. Even if their governments agreed to act, their separate command would make concerted resistance less effective than action under the single government of Great Britain. England appears here as one part of a larger political arrangement, and the comparison turns on the practical difference between possessing forces and being able to direct them together.

The same reasoning is extended from military organization to naval power. The text credits a national government’s regulation of British navigation with helping make it a nursery for seamen, and argues that this government could call upon the country’s resources and materials to form fleets. If England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland each maintained a separate navigation system and fleet under independent governments, each would, the argument predicts, dwindle in comparative importance. The point is not simply that England was powerful, but that the shared framework made the strength of its component parts usable on a common scale.

That comparison is turned toward the American states. If thirteen states, or three or four separate governments, had to raise and pay armies independently, the text asks what forces or fleets they could hope to sustain. A state under attack might not receive help from jealous neighbors: they could be persuaded to remain neutral, or prefer their immediate safety to spending blood and money in another state’s defense. The British example thus links union to the ability to act for a threatened part, while the imagined divided arrangement exposes the danger that local interests could defeat common defense.

Neighboring Peoples and Political Rivalry

England’s history also supplies a warning about the persistence of internal division. The text describes the peoples of the British island as divided for ages into three nations, frequently embroiled in quarrels and wars. Although their interests in relation to continental nations were substantially shared, external powers could exploit their mutual jealousies. For long periods, the divided peoples were consequently more troublesome and inconvenient to one another than useful or supportive.

The comparison is used to challenge the expectation that separate American confederacies would remain cordial. Were America divided into three or four nations, the text argues, similar jealousies would arise and could be encouraged. Confidence and affection would give way to envy; each confederacy would pursue its own partial interest rather than the general interest of America. The predicted result is recurring disputes or war, or at least a continuing apprehension of conflict among bordering states.

The warning is reinforced by the instability of any supposed balance among separate confederacies. Even if they could be made equal in strength at their formation, the text asks what could preserve that equality. Local conditions might advance one and impede another, while differences in policy and administration could further alter their relative power. England’s example therefore belongs to a broader argument: common interests do not by themselves prevent rivalry, and political separation leaves those interests exposed to jealousy, unequal development, and foreign influence.

English Institutions and the Limits of Analogy

England is also part of a comparative argument about the proper scale of republican government. The text disputes the use of Montesquieu’s recommendation of small republics as a reason to reject a large confederacy. It argues that the republics Montesquieu had in view were far smaller than states such as Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, or Georgia. If his standard were applied rigidly, the text contends, Americans would face a choice between monarchy and an infinity of small, jealous, conflicting commonwealths. The English example is thus situated within a debate about how political principles should be interpreted, rather than treated as a model to copy without regard to scale or circumstance.

In its discussion of civil trials, the text describes New York’s judicial arrangements as resembling those of Great Britain more closely than the systems of the other states. New York has common-law courts, probate courts analogous in certain respects to English spiritual courts, a court of admiralty, and a court of chancery. Jury trial prevails in the common-law courts, subject to exceptions; the other courts generally proceed under a single judge, using procedures associated with canon or civil law and without a jury. The comparison identifies a particular institutional resemblance while showing that jury trial does not operate uniformly across every kind of court.

The text further connects English legal practice to the treatment of prize cases. It says treaties among European powers had specifically regulated how such cases were determined and that in Great Britain they could be re-examined, in the last resort, before the king in privy council, with both fact and law reviewed. This example supports its concern that a constitutional rule imposing one state’s jury system as a national standard might be unsuitable. The issue is not presented as a general rejection of juries, but as a warning that international disputes can involve legal and policy considerations that call for different procedures.

Liberty, Constitutional History, and Political Safeguards

England’s constitutional history provides a further example of how political safeguards developed in response to concentrated authority. The text traces the gradual reduction of monarchical prerogative after the Norman Conquest, first through the barons and later through the people. It identifies the Revolution of 1688, which brought the Prince of Orange to the throne of Great Britain, as the point at which English liberty became fully triumphant in this account.

The history is made concrete through the issue of a standing army in peacetime. Charles II had kept 5,000 regular troops by his own authority, and James II increased that force to 30,000, paying for it from his civil list. At the Revolution, the English Bill of Rights made raising or maintaining a peacetime army unlawful without Parliament’s consent. The text presents this rule as a response to the danger of an undefined royal power to make war and to keep troops in peacetime; it uses the English precedent to explain the political roots of opposition to peacetime military establishments.

England also enters the discussion of protections against arbitrary government through legal safeguards described as absent from the constitution of New York. The text singles out habeas corpus, the prohibition of ex post facto laws, and the prohibition of titles of nobility as protections of liberty and republican government. Its account emphasizes the danger of punishing conduct that was not unlawful when committed, as well as arbitrary imprisonment. It calls the habeas corpus act the bulwark of the British Constitution, and treats the exclusion of hereditary distinctions as foundational to keeping government republican. England thus supplies both a historical illustration of liberty secured against executive power and a point of comparison for assessing constitutional protections.

Across these arguments, England’s significance is deliberately varied. The political unity of Great Britain illustrates the practical gains of coordinated action; the history of division warns that neighboring communities can turn shared interests into rivalry; and English constitutional and judicial practices offer specific precedents whose relevance depends on their institutional context. The comparisons do not erase differences between the British system, the American states, and the proposed federal arrangement. Instead, England becomes a store of political examples through which the text argues both for union and for care in deciding which features of another system can responsibly inform American government.