d that duties may be laid upon the publications so
high as to amount to a prohibition. I know not by what logic it could be
maintained, that the declarations in the State constitutions, in favor
of the freedom of the press, would be a constitutional impediment to
the imposition of duties upon publications by the State legislatures.
It cannot certainly be pretended that any degree of duties, however
low, would be an abridgment of the liberty of the press. We know that
newspapers are taxed in Great Britain, and yet it is notorious that the
press nowhere enjoys greater liberty than in that country. And if duties
of any kind may be laid without a violation of that liberty, it
is evident that the extent must depend on legislative discretion,
respecting the liberty of the press, will give it no greater security
than it will have without them. The same invasions of it may be effected
under the State constitutions which contain those declarations through
the means of taxation, as under the proposed Constitution, which has
nothing of the kind. It would be quite as significant to declare that
government ought to be free, that taxes ought not to be excessive, etc.,
as that the liberty of the press ought not to be restrained.

4. Vide Rutherford's Institutes, Vol. 2, Book II, Chapter X, Sections
XIV and XV. Vide also Grotius, Book II, Chapter IX, Sections VIII and
IX.

FEDERALIST No. 85

Concluding Remarks

From MCLEAN's Edition, New York. Wednesday, May 28, 1788

HAMILTON

To the People of the State of New York:

ACCORDING to the formal division of the subject of these papers,
announced in my first number, there would appear still to remain for
discussion two points: "the analogy of the proposed government to your
own State constitution," and "the additional security which its adoption
will afford to republican government, to liberty, and to property." But
these heads have been so fully anticipated and exhausted in the progress
of the work, that it would now scarcely be possible to do any thing
more than repeat, in a more dilated form, what has been heretofore said,
which the advanced stage of the question, and the time already spent
upon it, conspire to forbid.

It is remarkable, that the resemblance of the plan of the convention
to the act which organizes the government of this State holds, not
less with regard to many of the supposed defects, than to the real
excellences of the former. Among the pretended defect