We have no further interest in the short record of that September 15. No other change was made in the Madison Fifth Article except to take out of it any _constitutional_ mode of procedure for the exercise of the existing ability of ourselves, the “people” or “conventions,” to deprive any state of an equal representation in the Senate with every other state. We still can do that, but we have no _constitutional_ mode of procedure under the Fifth Article by which we can exercise our ability to do it. This change was not, however, as so many have absurdly thought, an exception to an imaginary power which we ourselves, the “conventions” of the Seventh Article and the “people” of the Preamble and the Tenth Amendment, in those very “conventions,” “granted” to ourselves, the same “people” and “conventions” mentioned in the Fifth Article. It was a recognition of our existing ability, about to be exercised in those “conventions,” the ability of the supreme will in America to deprive any state of its equal representation in the Senate; and it was our own exclusion of that ability from any _constitutional_ exercise. The reflecting mind will remember that, in the heated arguments at Philadelphia, there was strong sentiment in favor of asking us, the people of America, the “conventions” of the Seventh Article, to exercise our exclusive ability in that very respect and make the Senate a body composed of members elected from larger proportions of the people than the members of the House of Representatives. It was the recollection of that effort which prompted the request that our exclusive ability to do that very thing should not be provided with a _constitutional_ mode of future exercise. We average Americans may now leave, in our present education, the entire story of that wonderful Convention at Philadelphia. We leave it with a knowledge of our Constitution we never had until we had lived with those Americans through the actual record of those three months and seventeen days from the end of May to September 17, 1787. We bring from it a knowledge that brooks no contradiction. We are certain that nothing in any of the Articles proposed at Philadelphia purported to give the state legislatures any power of any kind whatever, in the Fifth Article or anywhere else, either to interfere with the individual freedom of the American citizen or to grant the power of such interference to themselves or to our only government, the Congress. We bring from that Convention the knowledge that, _unless_ something in the conventions of the American people, the “conventions” of the Seventh Article _and the Fifth Article_, changed the free men of America, the citizens of America, into subjects of an omnipotent legislative government, we ourselves in 1923 are still the citizens of America and possessors of the supreme will in America and are subjects of no government or governments in the world. CHAPTER XI