Hamilton goes on in Federalist 17 to reinforce this natural propensity to prefer what is near at hand, with an important exception: “Upon the same principle that a man is more attached to his family than to his neighborhood than to the community at large, the people of each state would be apt to feel a stronger bias towards their local governments, than towards the government of the union, unless the force of that principle should be destroyed by a much better administration of the latter.”
