Sensing that this explanation will not mollify the anti-Federalists, he continues to explain that people are more naturally attached to their local governments. In those days, before the phenomenon of nationalism, this made sense. The states have been around longer, and the people are more likely to be familiar with their local leaders than with some distant bureaucrat. Today, however, with people moving around more and with the nation mattering more in people's worldview, I think the situation has been reversed.
Madison admits that the situation in 1788 might change: "If, therefore, as has been elsewhere remarked, the people should in future become more partial to the federal than to the State governments, the change can only result from such manifest and irresistible proofs of a better administration, as will overcome all their antecedent propensities." I don't know if people today identify as Americans rather than Pennsylvanians or Nevadans because the federal government is a better administration; I think it's more likely that it's just bigger and more powerful, and that the differences among the states have faded.
As the character of the federal Congresses of the past is concerned, Madison writes that they have often acted in the national interest, even when it disadvantaged their own states. This is probably correct, but one must note that this was in the days before Congress had any money to give out.
Madison closes: "On summing up the considerations stated in this and the last paper, they seem to amount to the most convincing evidence, that the powers proposed to be lodged in the federal government are as little formidable to those reserved to the individual States, as they are indispensably necessary to accomplish the purposes of the Union; and that all those alarms which have been sounded, of a meditated and consequential annihilation of the State governments, must, on the most favorable interpretation, be ascribed to the chimerical fears of the authors of them."Was he wrong? Yes, but it took more than a century for these "chimerical fears" to come true, and even then the people could have stopped it if they'd wanted to. So, if the chimera has come to exist outside of anti-Federalists' nightmares, it is not because the Constitution was flawed, but because the people were imperfect guardians of our own liberty.
