That this was a signal perversion of the true relation between party names and party objects can scarcely be denied. Yet we who have, in later days, witnessed the caprices in respect to party names to which the public mind has been occasionally subjected, and the facility with which one party has, through its superior address or its greater activity, succeeded in attaching to its adversary an unsuitable and unwelcome name, have not as much reason to be surprised at that perversion as had the men of that day who were subjected to it. The motive which operated in thus denying to men whose principles were federal the name which indicated them, and in giving it to their opponents, must be looked for in the fact that federal principles were at that time favored by the mass of the people. This was well understood at the time, and was made still more apparent by the circumstance that those who really adhered to them, though compelled by the superior address of their adversaries to act under the name of Anti-Federalists, maintained their ascendancy in the government of the Confederation to its close. Those who require further proof of the truth of this position beyond what results from a mere statement of the principles contended for by the respective parties, will find it fully sustained by definitions of Gouverneur Morris and James Madison. (2 Madison _Papers_, pp. 747-8, and 893.) Mr. Morris explained the distinction between a _federal_ and a _national_ supreme government,--the former being a mere compact resting on the good faith of the parties, the latter having a complete and _compulsive_ operation. Mr. Madison, in the debate on the propositions of Mr. Patterson, which constituted the plan of the Anti-Federalists, and which were rejected by a vote of seven States to three,--one (Maryland) divided,--said: "Much stress has been laid by some gentlemen on the want of power in the Convention to propose any other than a _federal_ plan.... Neither of the characteristics of a federal plan would support this objection. One characteristic was that in a _federal_ government the power was exercised, not on the people _individually_, but on the people _collectively_, on the _States_. The other characteristic was that a _federal_ government derived its appointments, not immediately from the people, but from the States which they respectively composed." It cannot be difficult to decide which of these parties was, in truth, _federal_, and which _anti-federal_, according to these authentic definitions of a federal government.[3]