Jay Cost

“As German chancellor Otto Von Bismarck is once reputed to have said, “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” The events in the last half of 1814 had proved that adage right.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“Madison’s examination of confederacies such as those in ancient Greece and in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland revealed a similar pattern: those that lack a strong central authority are doomed to fail. He would conclude that an imperium in imperio, or a government of governments, “is a solecism in theory” and in practice subverts the “order and ends of civil polity, by substituting violence in place of law, or the destructive coercion of the sword in place of the mild and salutary coercion of the magistracy.”14”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician