"Which somehow made it appropriate that The Federalist's hardest task--showing how a republic could be an empire without becoming a tyranny--fell to Madison, the most easily underestimated of the American Founders. 63 He fulfilled it, triumphantly, by connecting time, space, and scale. History had shown "instability, injustice, and confusion" always to have extinguished "popular governments," Madison wrote in the tenth Publius essay. Independence had yet to free Americans from these dangers. Complaints are everywhere heard . . . that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. Revoking liberty would be a remedy "worse than the disease." But curing it through equality would leave no one safe: [D] emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."