In addressing the question of how to maintain the balance of separated powers of government, James Madison takes issue with his lifelong friend Thomas Jefferson in Federalist No. 49. (Madison was writing, of course, under the pseudonym Publius, but Jefferson was later to learn of his co-authorship of the series with Hamilton, and said of the Federalist in a letter to Madison, “I confess it has rectified me in several points.”) Jefferson had proposed, in a draft constitution for Virginia published in his Notes on the State of Virginia, that two out of the three branches of government could decide when “a convention is necessary for altering the constitution or correcting breaches of it.” This was his way of coping with the possibility that the ship of state might list in one direction or another, as the power of one branch became too weighty and the other two branches sought to right the ship.

But for Madison this was an alarming proposal. He argued that such a return to the “same original authority” that made the constitution—namely the sovereignty of the people—ought to be restricted to “certain great and extraordinary occasions,” and shouldn’t be available for coping with the routine interbranch tensions and struggles that take place in the separation of powers. It was probably impractical in any event. Such a mechanism as Jefferson proposed might invite two branches to gang up on the third, not because of its strength but because of its weakness. And in the best case it probably “would not answer the purpose of maintaining the constitutional equilibrium of the government,” because the legislature would be the most frequent offender to be checked, and that same branch would have all the advantages of its members being elected to the convention formed for “corrective” purposes. This was not a reliable way to engage “the reason of the public” rather than its passions. Some better, more regular and ordinary method of maintaining the separation of powers would have to be found.

At the heart of Madison’s argument is a more general point, expressing a conservatism that one does not generally find in Jefferson’s thought, however “rectified” he was by the Federalist. “[F]requent appeals” to the people’s sovereignty, Madison said, “would in great measure deprive the government of that veneration, which time bestows on every thing, and without which perhaps the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite stability.” We will never see a “nation of philosophers”; most people, most of the time, do not turn their attention very much to matters of high politics, let alone constitutional theory. Thus, since it is not “a superfluous advantage, to have the prejudices of the community” in favor of the established order, it is important to “fortify opinion” on its side by letting it get a little age on it, just as is.

The United States had lived under the Articles of Confederation for less than a decade. The necessity of abandoning that short-lived system in a wholesale change to the Constitution had engaged the American people in a debate so fundamental and so intense that no sensible person could wish to repeat the experience again soon. Jefferson remained resistant to this wisdom to the end of his days, but Madison was right to say that “the experiments are of too ticklish a nature to be unnecessarily multiplied.”

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