The heart of the project. Here are gathered the full body of Loyalist responses to The Federalist Papers. In time this archive will comprise 85 Papers forming a modern counterpoint to the American founding. Refer to the Project Ledger for an up-to-date index and to track the project’s progress.
Total read time: 2 hours, 58 minutes.
Image: Parliamentary rolls of Acts. Parliamentary Archives, UK Parliament. Public domain.
Loyalist № 20. Who are "the people" when the law refuses to name them? There is a structural silence at the heart of the American founding – a deliberate decision to leave suffrage to the States. From the shadow of the three-fifths compromise to the unenviable inheritance of modern populism, the question remains: what happens when a popular democracy is built on a definition that was never meant...
Loyalist № 19. Hamilton warned that formulas for fairness would only breed jealousy. Canada built Confederation on equalization, promising equity among Provinces through fiscal federalism. Our Dominion, however, will only endure not by quotas and ledgers but by remembering Our shared allegiance to the Crown.
Loyalist № 18. Might the Empire have prevented the American Revolution by expanding Westminster into an Imperial Parliament? One of many proposals that were put forward by American and British Statesmen alike, demographics would have doomed it to failure. Canada's Confederation offered a new way forward in loyalty to the Crown.
Loyalist № 17. The machinery of a republic must be carefully regulated. When the energy of government rises unchecked, it risks surging into tyranny; when it declines too far, it stalls into gridlock or chaos. The role of institutions, as the Founders envisioned, is to maintain this equilibrium – preserving a government vigorous enough to act decisively yet restrained enough to protect liberty.
Loyalist № 16. Democracy needs more than elections. Madison defended an appointed Senate not as a barrier to the popular will, but as its ballast. Our first Canadian Prime Minister agreed: some institutions must stand apart from partisan winds. In Canada, as in the early republic, not all wisdom comes by vote.
Loyalist № 15. The Framers believed that regular reviews would guard against military overreach. Unlike Britain – where oversight grew out of war, oppression, and hard-won tradition – America built its safeguards on reason alone. But history suggests that civic memory, not argument, is the most enduring foundation of liberty.
Loyalist № 14. In Federalist No. 28, Hamilton defends the people’s right to resist their government – a principle rooted in the Revolution and alive still in American political culture. From the Civil War to domestic terrorism, the legacy is clear: when every citizen is sovereign, rebellion becomes not the exception, but the expectation.
Loyalist № 13. Hamilton called the judiciary the “least dangerous” branch. Yet history played out very differently. From Marbury to Dobbs, the U.S. Supreme Court has shaped the political order as deeply as any elected branch. Its real power lay not only in constitutional design, but in popular legitimacy – something the Westminster experience shows cannot be engineered, only inherited.
Loyalist № 12. What began with Lincoln as a reluctant claim of necessity has become a near-permanent feature of executive power in the United States. In the name of liberty, Americans have surrendered many of the very safeguards meant to protect it – and in doing so, invited the rise of presidential power without restraint.
Loyalist № 11. The U.S. Presidency, once a modest office constrained by law, has swelled into an entity with near-monarchical power – issuing thousands of executive orders, waging undeclared wars, and reshaping global treaties without Congress. The very safeguards that Hamilton extolled now seem weakened, raising the question: has the Republic strayed too far from its founding principles?