The contest opened on the Clintonian side, with the argument that an
amended Confederation was all that was necessary for the purposes of a
more general welfare. The plan advanced was that Congress should be
given the power to compel by force the payment of the requisitions which
the States so often ignored. Hamilton demolished this proposition with
one of his most scornful outbursts.

Coerce the States! [he cried]. Never was a madder project devised!
Do you imagine that the result of the failure of one State to
comply would be confined to that State alone? Are you so willing to
hazard a civil war? Consider the refusal of Massachusetts, the
attempt at compulsion by Congress. What a series of pictures does
this conjure up? A powerful State procuring immediate assistance
from other States, particularly from some delinquent! A complying
State at war with a non-complying State! Congress marching the
troops of one State into the bosom of another! This State
collecting auxiliaries and forming perhaps a majority against its
Federal head! And can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a
government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting
itself?--a government that can exist only by the sword? And what
sort of a State would it be which would suffer itself to be used as
the instrument of coercing another? ... A Federal standing army,
then, must enforce the requisitions or the Federal treasury will be
left without supplies, and the government without support.... There
is but one cure for such an evil--to enable the national laws to
operate on individuals like the laws of the States. To take the old
Confederation as the basis of a new system, and to trust the sword
and the purse to a single assembly organized upon principles so
defective, giving it the full powers of taxation and the national
forces, would result in what--Despotism! To avoid the very issue
which appears to be held in such abject terror, a totally different
government from anything into which the old Confederation can be
twisted, or fitted out with wings and gables, must be established
with proper powers and proper checks and balances.

His words created a palpable uneasiness. The outburst was the more
effective for following and preceding close passionless and pointed
reasoning, a trenchant review of other repub