The men who opposed ratification had the small-republic doctrine, and they used it hard. Brutus opened his first essay to the citizens of New York with it; Cato used it; it was the ground of the objection the leading Anti-Federalists put first, that a territory as large as the American states together could not be governed on free principles.⁴⁶ Hamilton answered, in the ninth number, by turning to another part of the same book. The opponents of the plan, he writes, have with