Americans, some hundred and fifty years after their Puritan beginnings, looked beyond their settled loyalties to time and place and set in motion a second beginning, which marked them as a mature nation. Freely and deliberately they “approached that lofty pinnacle of glory” by stepping into the space left empty by the dispersal of authority through the Articles of Confederation. The Madisonian view of the Constitution, as we have seen repeatedly, clearly influenced Tocqueville. Madison was confident that the “good sense of the people of America” would not succumb to the “passions of the unthinking,” and would-prefer, “where power is to be conferred” to choose between the “GREATER, not the PERFECT, good.” He argued against a constitutional instrument in which “the authority of the whole society everywhere [would be] subordinate to the authority of the parts … a monster in which the head was under the direction of the members.” He declared against the partisans of state powers that