“Having shewn that no one of the powers transferred to the federal government is unnecessary or improper,” Madison writes in Federalist No. 45, “the next question to be considered is whether the whole mass of them will be dangerous to the portion of authority left in the several states.”

Notice that Madison expresses no concern about the “portion of authority” that the states would continue to enjoy if the Constitution were rejected. He takes it as given that the states will and should have a reduced sphere of authority under the new order. And he even makes light of the Anti-Federalist handwringing over the future of state power:

“Was then the American revolution effected, was the American confederacy formed, was the blood of thousands spilt, and the hard earned substance of millions lavished, not that the people of America should enjoy peace, liberty and safety; but that the governments of the individual states, that particular municipal establishments, might enjoy a certain extent of power, and be arrayed with certain dignities and attributes of sovereignty?”

Like Hamilton in No. 17, Madison’s worry is all in the other direction: “The state governments will have the advantage of the federal government” when it comes to any competing authority. It doesn’t look that way to us today, but at the founding and for a long time thereafter, this was the more reasonable concern.

Then Madison makes one of his rare rhetorical overstatements in the Federalist—in a passage that has become a favorite of conservative jurists in our own time who somehow miss the inflation of the argument: “The powers delegated by the proposed constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite.”

Few and defined? Just one essay earlier, Madison had written in full-throated defense of the implied-powers principle, and had explicitly rejected the alternative of attempting to “define” the federal government’s powers too much in advance, for fear of leaving it with too “few” powers to do its work effectively. There he had warned the reader against any step that would “disarm the government of all real authority whatever,” but instead argued for an expansive understanding of federal power to cope with “all the possible changes which futurity may produce.”

Yes, there’s a difference between the two spheres of authority. There is an indefiniteness about state legislative power, as Madison says in No. 45, even an undifferentiated character about much of it, extending to “all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people.” The federal government’s powers look more discrete or particularized, and “principally” have to do with “war, peace, negociation, and foreign commerce,” Madison says. We can forgive him his somewhat incomplete list here even of “principal” powers. But however much the federal government’s powers must be traceable ultimately to specific language in the Constitution, and however “few” those powers seem by comparison to the large panoply of state powers, it really won’t do to call them “definite” just one essay after you have been defending the proposition that the future of effective government depends on its ability to conjure new means to the Constitution’s ends, means we are incapable of stating with any definiteness beforehand.

(For explanation of this recurring feature, see here.)