CONVENTIONS CREATE GOVERNMENT OF MEN The Constitution is a written instrument. As such its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when adopted it means now. _Being a grant of powers to a government its language is general._... While the powers granted do not change, they apply from generation to generation to all things to which they are in their nature applicable. This in no manner abridges the fact of its changeless nature and meaning. Those things which are within its grant of power, as those grants were understood when made, are still within them, and those things not within them remain still excluded. (Justice Brewer, in the Supreme Court, South Carolina v. United States, 199 _U. S._ 437, at p. 448.) It is not only the same in words, but the same in meaning, and delegates the same powers to the government, and reserves and secures the same rights and privileges to the citizen; and as long as it continues to exist in its present form, it speaks not only in the same words; but with the same meaning and intent with which it spoke when it came from the hands of its framers, and was voted on and adopted by the people of the United States. (Scott v. Sandford, 19 _How._ 393, p. 426.) From which common sense statements of what always has been both reason and law, we know that whatever the Fifth Article meant to those who made it, in the conventions named in it as well as in the Seventh Article, it means today. There is no better way in which we can grasp its meaning to the American people assembled in those conventions, than by sitting with them and reading it as they read it, with their fresh knowledge of all the wonderful things in which they had participated from the Statute of ’76 to the proposal from Philadelphia of 1787. As we have just lived through all that period with them, we are in a wonderful position to read it and understand it as they understood it. Moreover, we are in a wonderful position to listen to the statements of the men in those “conventions.” In those statements, whether by advocates or opponents of the Constitution, we shall find the invincible negation--without one dissent--of the absurd _assumption_ that Madison’s Fifth Article is a “_grant_” of any ability _to make_ Articles. In those statements, we shall find all discussion of that Fifth Article centering upon the one question, i.e., whether it provides a practical mode of procedure in which the exclusive ability of the “people” or “conventions” can defend individual rights by _withdrawal_ of some part of the power of interference therewith granted in the First Article. Mason had pointed out at Philadelphia that the procedural provisions of the Fifth Article--_and it consists entirely of procedural provisions for the exercise of existing powers_--_left_ the drafting and proposal of Amendments entirely to governments. For which reason, in the “conventions,” Henry and all the