When Madison borrowed from Hume's writings on faction for his defense of an American extended republic, neither he, nor Hume, was standing on popular ground. Hume had argued: “Though it is more difficult to form a republican government in an extensive country than in a city; there is more facility, when once it is formed, of preserving it steady and uniform, without tumult and faction.” Madison followed Hume on that point, arguing that the task of founding an extended American republic was a formidable one. “As every State may be divided into different districts,” he wrote in Federalist No. 37, “and its citizens into different classes, which give birth to contending interests and local jealousies, so the different parts of the United States are distinguished from each other by a variety of circumstances, which produce a like effect on a larger scale. And although this variety of interests, for reasons sufficiently explained in a former paper,” wrote Madison with an unmistakable reference to Federalist No. 10, “may have a salutary influence on the administration of the Government when formed, yet every one must be sensible of the contrary influence which must have been experienced in the task of forming it.” Many of their contemporaries would not see Hume or Madison even this far. That a republican form of government could not exist, let alone flourish, for any length of time in a large geographic area was a widely-held and often-stated view in the eighteenth century, as it had been before then.