Outside the language of the Fifth Article itself, many other things make that fact clear to us. For instance, we recall what Madison has just told us. He had written this Article at Philadelphia. Then, asking the American people to prescribe this _constitutional_ mode of procedure for the future exercise of either respective existing ability, he has explained to us, just before the convention in which we sit, what the Fifth Article means. “That useful alterations will be suggested by experience, could not but be foreseen. It was requisite, therefore, that A MODE FOR INTRODUCING THEM should be provided. The mode preferred by the Convention seems to be stamped with every mark of propriety. It guards equally against that extreme facility, which would render the Constitution too mutable; and that extreme difficulty, which might perpetuate its discovered faults. It, moreover, equally enables the general and State governments TO ORIGINATE the amendment of errors, as they may be pointed out by the experience on one side, or on the other.” (_Fed._ No. 43.). Sitting in the conventions of more than a century ago, we are naturally uninfluenced (in our reading of plain English) by the story of a century which has not even yet begun, the century that later began in 1800. And so we get from his own words the knowledge that the author of the Fifth Article knew it to be nothing but a _constitutional_ mode of procedure, for the future exercise of either ability to make Articles. We see that the mode _leaves_ with either “the general and state governments” the ability to _propose_ an Amendment to those with existing power to make the particular proposed Amendment. And we note, with intent to remember, that the author of the Fifth Article, while he tells us about this reservation of existing abilities to _propose_ amendments, pointedly does _not_ tell us that the Article _grants_ any power to any government or governments to _make_ Amendments. In other words, we know that the Fifth Article _reserves_ to the general government and to the state governments exclusively what _otherwise_ they and every one else would have had--what Madison himself called “the unauthorized privilege of any respectable citizen or body of citizens”--the ability _to propose_, but that it does not _grant_ to any of those governments or all of them collectively the ability which none of them ever had or can have, the ability _to make_, constitutional Articles of a _national_ kind, which relate to interference with individual freedom. With this knowledge confirmed by the clear statement of the author of the Fifth Article, we read with interest its procedural provisions about the originating of new Articles, about their drafting and their proposal and the proposal of a mode of ratification for them, after they have been drafted and their nature has determined who can make them.