<P> Federalist No. 10 continues a theme begun in Federalist No. 9 and is titled "The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection". The whole series is cited by scholars and jurists as an authoritative interpretation and explication of the meaning of the Constitution . Historians such as Charles A. Beard argue that No. 10 shows an explicit rejection by the Founding Fathers of the principles of direct democracy and factionalism, and argue that Madison suggests that a representative republic is more effective against partisanship and factionalism . </P> <P> Madison saw the Constitution as forming a "happy combination" of a republic and a democracy and with "the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures" the power would not be centralized, thus making it "more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried". </P> <P> Prior to the Constitution, the thirteen states were bound together by the Articles of Confederation . These were in essence a military alliance between sovereign nations adopted to better fight the Revolutionary War . Congress had no power to tax, and as a result was not able to pay debts resulting from the Revolution . Madison, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and others feared a break - up of the union and national bankruptcy . Like Washington, Madison felt the revolution had not resolved the social problems that had triggered it, and the excesses ascribed to the King were now being repeated by the state legislatures . In this view, Shays' Rebellion, an armed uprising in Massachusetts in 1786, was simply one, albeit extreme, example of "democratic excess" in the aftermath of the War . </P> <P> A national convention was called for May 1787, to revise the Articles of Confederation . Madison believed that the problem was not with the Articles, but rather the state legislatures, and so the solution was not to fix the articles but to restrain the excesses of the states . The principal questions before the convention became whether the states should remain sovereign, whether sovereignty should be transferred to the national government, or whether a settlement should rest somewhere in between . By mid-June it was clear that the convention was drafting a new plan of government around these issues--a constitution . Madison's nationalist position shifted the debate increasingly away from a position of pure state sovereignty, and toward the compromise . In debate on June 26, he said that government ought to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority" and that unchecked, democratic communities were subject to "the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions". </P>

In federalist paper #10 faction loosely means in a more modern way