Europe is the principal comparative landscape through which the essays test claims about political union, security, liberty, and republican government. Its history supplies warnings as well as precedents: feudal authority fractured into rivalry, confederacies proved unable to control their members, and European powers could remain a danger to the United States across the ocean. Against those examples, the proposed American system is presented as a way to unite a large republic without simply reproducing either a loose league or a consolidated state.

Europe as a Political Comparison

The essays resist the assumption that separation would bring peace among neighboring political communities. They invoke the recurring force of national ambition, jealousy, commercial competition, and the private interests of leaders. In the Greek example, Pericles is portrayed as initiating the Peloponnesian War through a mixture of personal resentment and political calculation; the war eventually brought the ruin of the Athenian commonwealth. This history makes a broader point: public conflict may be driven not only by collective interests but also by the passions and ambitions of individuals who wield political influence.

Europe also supplies the essayists with a compact statement of the danger of proximity without effective union. Neighboring states, they argue, tend naturally toward rivalry unless common weakness compels them to form a confederate republic whose constitution can restrain the jealousies that neighborhood produces. The observation serves both as a warning about a disunited America and as an argument for a union capable of preventing conflicts among its members.

Feudal Disorder and the Weakness of Divided Authority

The account of feudal Europe presents a society with a common sovereign at its head but powerful subordinate lords across the territory. Each principal vassal exercised a kind of sovereignty within his own domain, supported by lesser dependents. The result, in the essayists’ account, was continual resistance to central authority and frequent warfare among the great lords. The sovereign was often too weak to preserve public peace or protect people from the immediate power of their local rulers; historians therefore describe the period as one of feudal anarchy.

Personal strength could temporarily compensate for weak institutions. A vigorous and capable monarch might acquire enough influence to impose order, but the balance usually favored the barons. Sometimes they cast off the monarch’s authority and established independent principalities. When monarchs ultimately prevailed, the essayists attribute their success in large part to the lords’ oppression of their dependents: mutual danger and interest brought the prince and the people together against the aristocracy. The counterfactual sharpens the lesson. Had the nobles treated their followers with justice and clemency, those followers might have remained loyal, and the struggle could have ended in the nobles’ favor, reducing or overturning royal authority. The example shows how political order depends not merely on formal hierarchy but on whether subordinate powers retain the allegiance of those under them.

Confederacies and the Failure to Govern Members

The essays compare Europe’s political record with confederacies in antiquity and in their own time. The Amphictyonic League, which associated Greek republics under a common council, offered a particularly instructive parallel to the American confederation. Its members remained sovereign and independent, with equal votes in the council. The council could address the common welfare, wage war, decide disputes among members, impose fines, use the confederacy’s force against disobedient parties, and admit new members. Its duties also included protecting religion and the wealth of the temple at Delphi.

These formal powers did not ensure collective action. Even during defensive wars against Persia and Macedon, the Greek members failed to act together and were repeatedly drawn into the service of their common enemy. Domestic conflict filled the intervals between foreign wars. After the war with Xerxes, a dispute over whether to expel cities accused of disloyalty exposed the ambitions of the most powerful members: Athens opposed the proposal because Sparta would lose fewer supporters and might dominate the council’s deliberations. The smaller members, though formally equal, had become dependent satellites of the stronger states.

The later history of the Greek confederacy makes the institutional weakness more consequential. Athens and Sparta, elevated by their victories over Persia, became rivals and then enemies; their mutual distrust led to the Peloponnesian War, which ended in the ruin and subjection of the Athenians. Another internal dispute began after the Phocians ploughed consecrated land belonging to the temple of Apollo. When Athens and Sparta supported the Phocians’ refusal to accept the council’s fine, Thebes and other cities attempted to uphold the council’s authority. The weaker side sought aid from Philip of Macedon, who had encouraged the contest; through intrigue, bribery, influence over political leaders, and force, he secured admission to the council and took control of the confederacy. The sequence illustrates how unresolved internal disputes can invite an outside power to exploit division.

The German Empire provides a later European example in which impressive constitutional powers coexist with institutional impotence. Its diet could legislate, make war and peace, contract alliances, set military and financial quotas, build fortresses, regulate coinage, admit members, and punish disobedient members by depriving them of sovereign rights and possessions. The emperor, in turn, could initiate proposals to the diet, veto resolutions, appoint ambassadors, confer honors, fill vacant electorates, administer public revenues, and protect public safety. Yet the empire rested on the premise that it was a community of sovereigns, its diet represented sovereigns, and its laws addressed sovereigns. In the essayists’ judgment, this made it unable to regulate its members or reliably protect itself from external danger.

The German record gives the constitutional diagnosis a history of consequences: wars between emperors and princes, conflicts among the princes themselves, stronger members’ abuse of weaker ones, foreign interference, and requisitions of money and troops that were ignored or only partly met. Attempts to enforce those demands could fail outright or bring widespread destruction. Even the emperor’s authority could be challenged militarily: in one sixteenth-century conflict he was routed and nearly captured by the Elector of Saxony, while the king of Prussia repeatedly proved more powerful than his imperial sovereign. The Thirty Years’ War devastated Germany, with the emperor and half the empire on one side and Sweden and the other half on the other; peace was eventually negotiated and dictated by foreign powers. For the essays, Europe’s confederacies demonstrate that enumerated common powers accomplish little when they remain directed at member governments rather than effectively governing the political community.

Security Across the Atlantic

Europe is not only a record of past constitutional experiments; it is also a source of prospective danger to the United States. Although an ocean separates the continents, the essays describe British settlements extending along one side of the American frontier and Spanish possessions extending along the other, with the West Indies adding another point of strategic contact. Improved navigation, they contend, has made distant nations neighbors in practical terms. Britain and Spain are major maritime powers, and a future alignment between them cannot safely be dismissed. The weakening of family ties between France and Spain is not considered a dependable safeguard, since political connections founded on kinship are precarious.

The essayists connect this international setting to a concrete security need. Small garrisons had been necessary on the western frontier before the Revolution and remained necessary after peace, if only to guard against raids. Militia detachments would not provide a workable substitute: citizens could not reasonably be expected to leave their occupations and families for recurring peacetime service, and frequent rotation would add expense, disrupt work, and burden private households. Permanent paid troops, though small, would still constitute a standing army. The problem therefore cannot be settled by an absolute constitutional ban; the argument is for leaving military arrangements to legislative judgment in light of the country’s needs.

The British example helps define that judgment. After the Norman Conquest, royal authority was gradually limited, first by the barons and then by the people. The essayists identify the Revolution of 1688 as the decisive triumph of English liberty. Charles II had kept 5,000 regular troops in peacetime by royal authority, and James II increased the number to 30,000, paid from his civil list. The resulting British Bill of Rights prohibited maintaining a peacetime standing army without Parliament’s consent. The example supports legislative control rather than a prohibition on legislative discretion: guards and garrisons may be necessary, national emergencies cannot be precisely bounded in advance, and the power to meet contingencies must exist somewhere in government.

Europe in the Argument for a Large Republic

Europe’s history helps frame the essays’ defense of enlarging the sphere of republican government. The writers reject an interpretation of Montesquieu that would confine republics to small territories. If that standard were applied to the American states, they argue, it would force a choice between monarchy and a multiplication of small, jealous, conflicting commonwealths. A confederacy, by contrast, can suppress faction, preserve internal tranquillity, and strengthen common security. Europe’s record makes the political cost of a weak union visible; it does not, in the essayists’ argument, prove that republican government must remain confined to a small territory.

This contrast is sharpened by the proposed Constitution’s mixed character. The essayists say its foundation is federal because ratification comes from the people acting through their distinct and independent states, not from a majority of the entire population acting as one nation. Its ordinary powers draw on both principles: the House of Representatives represents people proportionally, while the Senate represents states equally. In operation, federal powers generally reach individual citizens, giving the system a national character; in the extent of those powers, it remains federal rather than an unlimited national supremacy. Its amendment rule likewise belongs wholly to neither model. Europe’s confederacies thus serve as cautionary comparisons, while the American plan is presented as an arrangement that combines union with state participation instead of leaving sovereign members beyond the effective reach of common government.

The same reasoning links political scale to the protection of rights. In a small society, a majority faction may more readily unite against a minority, making oppression recurrent and tempting the very victims of misrule to seek an authority independent of popular control. In the extended republic of the United States, the variety of interests, parties, and religious groups makes a majority coalition less likely to form except on grounds of justice and the general good. Europe therefore occupies two roles in the essays: its conflicts warn against divided and ineffective authority, while its historical variety supplies comparisons for a larger republican union. The desired lesson is not that Europe offers a single pattern to copy, but that American institutions must be strong enough to govern collectively without extinguishing the states that compose the union.