At this point, we average Americans, sitting with those amazing Americans in their “conventions,” fix firmly in our minds, _with intent never to forget_, the fact that the “conventions” of the Seventh Article command are indisputably the American people themselves; that the “conventions” of the Fifth Article command are identical (except as to the time in which the American people assemble) with the “conventions” of the Seventh Article command; and that, therefore, the “conventions” of the Fifth Article command are also the people of America themselves. But the whole people of America are the “We, the people” of the Preamble. They are the only reservee of the Ninth Amendment, “the people” therein. They are the “most important factor” and reservee of the Tenth Amendment, “the people” therein. Wherefore, we grasp clearly why they are mentioned in the Fifth Article, because they have no government attorney in fact--as they could not have if we are “citizens of America”--to surrender what they reserved to themselves in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Sitting in those conventions, we recall the limited ability of state legislatures, each speaking for its own state, to make _federal_ Articles, Articles that neither interfere nor give power to interfere with individual liberty, the ability that made all the federal Articles of 1781. And we recall that the Constitution does not take that ability from the “states respectively” and _their_ governments but _reserves_ it to the “states respectively” and their governments, as the Tenth Amendment expressly declares. And so we understand the _mention_ of that limited ability in the Fifth Article in the words “ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states.” And, educated by the experience of the amazing Americans with whom we sit, we realize the meaning of this particular statement or command of the supreme will, the people of America. That supreme will is creating a new nation out of its human possessors. It is destroying forever the complete independence of the respective states, but leaving each of the states a political entity with citizens and much independence. It is incorporating the system of a _federal_ union of states into the new national system of a union of all individual Americans, and it is subordinating the members of the _federal_ union and also the _federation_ itself to the union of human beings, to the supreme will in America, the will of the citizens of that nation. Therefore, as each state is no longer completely independent, it is no longer necessary that _every_ member of the _federal_ union shall utter its “Yes” to the making of any new Article of the _federal_ or declaratory kind, the only kind which governments ever can make. And so we clearly understand, as the early Americans in their conventions understood at once, that the words “ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states” was to be the command of the American people,