Now, if Wilson and the other delegates at Philadelphia, on September 10, knew that to make a proposal was no exercise of power, they clearly understood that Madison’s Fifth Article, when it stated that Congress might _propose_ an Amendment and Congress might _propose_ a mode of ratification, was an Article which purported to grant no power to Congress. If we recall the truth, which Madison so often expressed, that it is the privilege of any citizen or body of citizens to propose that existing power be exercised, we realize that, if the Fifth Article had not mentioned Congress as the maker of either proposal, Congress would still have had full ability to make either or both proposals at any time. As the delegates at Philadelphia knew this as well as we now know it, as we have been helped to our appreciation of it by them and their statements, it is apparent how instantly they knew that the mention of Congress, as the _proposer_ of an Amendment and as the _proposer_ of its mode of ratification, meant that Congress _alone_ was to be left with--_not given_--the duty which they had assumed themselves to perform at Philadelphia. That duty, as they knew and we now know, was to draft a proposed Article and, after it had been worded, to examine it and its nature and (with the validity of their ultimate proposal absolutely determined by that nature) then to propose the Article and a mode of ratification for it which would mean ratification by those competent to ratify an Article of _its particular kind_. In other words, they knew that, whenever Congress performed the duty they had just performed themselves, after an Article had been drafted, it would be legally necessary for Congress, as it had been for them at Philadelphia, to consider the existing and different abilities of the “people” or “conventions” and the state legislatures to make Articles, and from that consideration to ascertain a competent ratifier for the particular Article they had drafted and, the validity of the ratification to depend entirely on the accuracy of their ascertainment and not on their own proposal of ratification, to propose a mode of ratification in which that Article would be made by those competent to make it. With the meaning and effect of a “proposal” so clearly known to them all, with their own immediate recent experience in the performance of the very duty which Madison’s Fifth Article _left_ the duty of Congress in the future, it was a simple matter for these delegates at Philadelphia to know exactly what was the only possible meaning of Madison’s words, when the same “shall have been ratified by three fourths at least of the legislatures of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the legislature of the U. S.”