al and coincident
benefit. For it is an observation, as true as it is trite, that there is
nothing men differ so readily about as the payment of money.

Laws in violation of private contracts, as they amount to aggressions
on the rights of those States whose citizens are injured by them, may
be considered as another probable source of hostility. We are not
authorized to expect that a more liberal or more equitable spirit would
preside over the legislations of the individual States hereafter, if
unrestrained by any additional checks, than we have heretofore seen in
too many instances disgracing their several codes. We have observed the
disposition to retaliation excited in Connecticut in consequence of
the enormities perpetrated by the Legislature of Rhode Island; and we
reasonably infer that, in similar cases, under other circumstances, a
war, not of PARCHMENT, but of the sword, would chastise such atrocious
breaches of moral obligation and social justice.

The probability of incompatible alliances between the different States
or confederacies and different foreign nations, and the effects of this
situation upon the peace of the whole, have been sufficiently unfolded
in some preceding papers. From the view they have exhibited of this part
of the subject, this conclusion is to be drawn, that America, if
not connected at all, or only by the feeble tie of a simple league,
offensive and defensive, would, by the operation of such jarring
alliances, be gradually entangled in all the pernicious labyrinths of
European politics and wars; and by the destructive contentions of the
parts into which she was divided, would be likely to become a prey to
the artifices and machinations of powers equally the enemies of them
all. Divide et impera(1) must be the motto of every nation that either
hates or fears us.(2)

PUBLIUS

1. Divide and command.

2. In order that the whole subject of these papers may as soon as
possible be laid before the public, it is proposed to publish them four
times a week--on Tuesday in the New York Packet and on Thursday in the
Daily Advertiser.

FEDERALIST No. 8

The Consequences of Hostilities Between the States

From the New York Packet. Tuesday, November 20, 1787.

HAMILTON

To the People of the State of New York:

ASSUMING it therefore as an established truth that the several States,
in case of disunion, or such combinations of them as might happen to be
formed out of the wreck of the g