Germany is presented in The Federalist as a cautionary example of confederal weakness: a polity may possess elaborate institutions and a nominally powerful head yet remain unable to regulate its members, protect itself, or sustain common government. Its divided authority also provides a concrete contrast for arguments about commerce, taxation, and the proposed Constitution’s mixed federal and national character.

Germany as a Comparative Example

The essays invoke Germany in several distinct comparisons. In discussing the scale suitable for republican government, the argument rejects the idea that Montesquieu’s preference for small republics requires dividing the American states into numerous petty commonwealths. The comparison implies that Germany’s political fragmentation is no remedy for the problems of a large republic; division would instead expose communities to jealousy and discord.

Germany also enters the argument over national wealth and taxation. Its territory is contrasted with the wealth of the United Netherlands, Russia, and France to show that land area and population do not provide a reliable measure of a country’s ability to contribute to public revenue. Wealth, the essay argues, arises from many interacting conditions—including situation, soil, climate, government, commerce, arts, and industry—so fixed contribution quotas based on land or population risk inequality and oppression.

Confederation and Political Weakness

The account of Germany’s imperial constitution emphasizes the gap between authority on paper and authority in practice. The emperor possesses extensive prerogatives, including proposing measures to the Diet, vetoing its resolutions, appointing ambassadors, conferring titles, applying public revenues, and overseeing public safety. Yet the empire rests on the principle that it is a community of sovereigns: the Diet represents sovereigns, and its laws are addressed to sovereigns. In the essay’s analysis, that structure makes the empire a nerveless body, unable to regulate its members, insecure against external dangers, and continually unsettled within.

The history offered in support is a sequence of conflicts rather than a stable common order: wars between the emperor and the princes, struggles among the members, the strong abusing their position and the weak suffering oppression, foreign interference, and requisitions of men and money that are disregarded or only partly met. Attempts to enforce those demands, the essay says, could fail outright or produce slaughter and devastation that harmed the innocent along with the guilty.

The Thirty Years’ War is the starkest example. Germany was devastated by a conflict in which the emperor and half the empire fought on one side, while Sweden and the other half stood on the other. Peace came through negotiation and was dictated by foreign powers; the terms, involving those powers, became fundamental to the settlement. The episode makes the confederacy’s internal division visible as a vulnerability that outside forces could shape.

Trade, Revenue, and Common Rules

Germany’s internal commerce illustrates how separate jurisdictions can obstruct the very resources on which public power depends. The essays describe German trade as burdened by the many duties that princes and states exacted on merchandise passing through their territories. Even the country’s fine streams and navigable rivers—natural routes that might support commerce—were rendered almost useless by these tolls.

The comparison sharpens an argument about American union. If states set commercial regulations separately, their differing rules can encourage evasions, illicit trade, and retaliatory measures. German experience serves as a warning that divided regulation may turn internal routes into barriers and make citizens of one jurisdiction seem like foreigners to another. A general Union, by contrast, is presented as better able to make duties simpler and more effective, support commerce, and enlarge the revenue available to government.

Fiscal capacity is also linked to commerce. The essays argue that trade increases both the quantity and circulation of money, making taxes easier to pay and public supplies easier to raise. Germany appears in this discussion as a comparison with the United Netherlands and other European countries: land and population alone cannot capture the differences in active wealth on which a fair assessment of contributions would depend.

Place in the Constitutional Argument

Germany’s role is not simply to stand for disorder. It supplies a recurring test of institutional design: whether a central body can make decisions that bind members, collect adequate resources, and coordinate rules across their territories. The American Confederation is described as requiring the concurrence of thirteen distinct sovereign wills for the complete execution of important measures; the resulting failures and delinquencies had brought the national government close to a standstill. Germany’s history gives that structural problem a wider comparative frame.

The proposed Constitution is characterized as neither wholly national nor wholly federal, but a composition of both. Its foundation is federal, resting on the assent of the people acting through their states; its ordinary powers are drawn partly from federal and partly from national sources; its powers operate nationally, while their extent is federal; and its amendment process combines features of both. Against the German example, this mixed arrangement is presented as an effort to preserve union without reproducing a confederacy in which sovereign members can leave common purposes ineffective.