f several years. It is sufficiently difficult to preserve a personal
responsibility in the members of a NUMEROUS body, for such acts of
the body as have an immediate, detached, and palpable operation on its
constituents.

The proper remedy for this defect must be an additional body in the
legislative department, which, having sufficient permanency to provide
for such objects as require a continued attention, and a train of
measures, may be justly and effectually answerable for the attainment of
those objects.

Thus far I have considered the circumstances which point out the
necessity of a well-constructed Senate only as they relate to the
representatives of the people. To a people as little blinded by
prejudice or corrupted by flattery as those whom I address, I shall not
scruple to add, that such an institution may be sometimes necessary as a
defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.
As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all
governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately
prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in
public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion,
or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations
of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will
afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical
moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and
respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career,
and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves,
until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the
public mind? What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have
often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard
against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then
have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens
the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.

It may be suggested, that a people spread over an extensive region
cannot, like the crowded inhabitants of a small district, be subject
to the infection of violent passions, or to the danger of combining
in pursuit of unjust measures. I am far from denying that this is a
distinction of peculiar importance. I have, on the contrary,
endeavored in a former paper to show, that it is one of the principal
recommendations of a confederated repub