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xxviii that the author's true thoughts stood revealed. As essays intended to combat the letters of "Cato" and "Brutus," frequent digressions and repetitions were made to disprove such postulates of those publications as were found to influence the people. Written especially to influence the voters of the state of New York, its references to local circumstances, and especially to the state constitution, were constant. Furthermore, the work was written with the utmost haste by three men, with few opportunities to consult, leading to frequent duplication, and to some inconsistencies. "The haste," wrote one of its authors, "with which many of the papers were penned in order to get through the subject while the Constitution was before the public, and to comply with the arrangement by which the printer was to keep his paper open for four numbers every week, was such that the performance must have borne a very different aspect without the aid of historical and other notes which had been used in the Convention, and without the familiarity with the whole subject produced by the discussions there. It frequently happened that, while the printer was putting into types parts of a number, the following parts were under the pen and to be furnished in time for the press." "The particular circumstances," wrote Hamilton, in the preface of the first collected edition of The Federalist, "under which these papers have been written have rendered it impracticable to avoid violations of method and repetitions of ideas which cannot but displease a critical reader."

Yet despite these adverse conditions, the writers of The Federalist produced a work which from the moment of publication has been acknowledged to be at once the ablest commentary on the federal constitution and one of the most solid and brilliant works on government ever written. "It would be difficult," wrote a critic in 1788, "to find a treatise which, in so small a compass, contains so much valuable political information, or in which