Paper15

Summary: Federalist paper number 15 titled "The Insufficiency of the Present Confederation to Preserve the Union" was published on December 1st, 1787 by Alexander Hamilton under the pseudonym Publius. The paper is the first of six, that address the failures of the Articles of Confederation. The document describes a future in which the current government has constant problems with both anarchy and its weak lending and borrowing system which will lead to mass turmoil. Publius states that it is necessary that the states must create a new government that will stand for both peace and tranquility. In addition he says that a weak central government can not protect the liberties of the people, nor enforce their laws or collect taxes. Finally Publius states that people are not perfect and ultimately need a strong government to enforce laws of the governed people.

1. The main idea of that Publius tries to argue is that the Articles of Confederation are an insufficient government that cannot properly address the needs of the people. This is because of the weak central central government cannot even protect itself internally let alone externally.

2. The strongest point that Publius makes is that the central government has no real way to protect its citizens. With no national army a rebellion can occur at any time and the government has no force to stop it. In addition the country is in major turmoil at this time and an attack from any european nation would devastate the people of american and destroy the country.

3. If the Anti-Federalists were to refute this their biggest argument would be that the central government does not have to protect each state individually, because each of the states have their own militia and can defend themselves from each other. Also if an attack from another country comes each individual state will be able to protect themselves because they each have their own militia and can once again protect themselves.

4. The Federalists have a solid argument which is clearly the stronger one with very few flaws. On the other side the Anti-Federalist argument is based upon very little fact and is clearly full of holes and flawed. For example each state is a different size and therefore will have different populations so each state will have a different sized state militia. Small states such as Rhode Island would be easily taken over by larger states like New York based on the sheer size of their militia. Also if an even larger army such as an external one from europe were to come it, it would be able to take over each state one at a time because the Articles of Confederation do not allow one states militia to go into another.

5. A modern day example of why it was a necessity to change the old government to the new constitution is the war in Iraq. Without a national army like we have today we would not have been able to send troops there. The mobilization of these troops would have been near impossible because the states would not be able to work together as well as the army can because it has only one leader and one person to tell them what to do.