"An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government."
I love that excerpt!
Hamilton was addressing the people who did not want an energetic and powerful national government. They believed that the power would be abused by the national government as it grew and were happy with living in a union of 13 Individual states.
Hamilton wrote to his friend James Duane that the current govt (under the Articles of Confederation) was fit for neither peace nor war and that the States were energized by an uncontrollable sovereignty. I had to smile when I read that letter.
The problem was that the states had power, but the United States had no ability to defend itself from foreign invasion or develop an interstate exchange system (money). If the nation were to survive, it had to have an authority above the State governments.
The last sentence warns us of popular energies in government. Politicians who extoll the “rights of the people,” is where dangerous ambitions gain their foothold; tyranny follows.