sitting in those conventions, that a “Yes” from three fourths of the state governments would, thereafter, be necessary and sufficient for the making of a new proposed _federal_ or declaratory Article. And we do _not_ understand, as the Americans in those conventions _never_ understood, that those words implied any “_grant_” of ability to the state governments to make _any_ Articles in _our_ Constitution, much less Articles by which governments interfere or give power to interfere with the individual freedom of the American citizen outside the matters enumerated in our First Article. On the contrary, it becomes amazingly clear to us that the “conventions” of the American citizens are mentioned in the Fifth Article because the American citizens are the important reservee of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. And it becomes equally clear that the “legislatures of the several states” are mentioned in the Fifth Article because the “states respectively” are the _lesser_ reservees named in the Tenth Amendment. The Tenth Amendment tells us that no power of _any kind_ is given, by the new Constitution, to _any_ grantee except to the new nation and _its_ government, the American government. It tells us that some powers, which each state had hitherto possessed, are taken from it; that the exercise of other powers, which each state had hitherto possessed, are now prohibited to it; and that _only_ the _other_ powers (_which each state had hitherto possessed_) are _left_ with that state by the command of the supreme will in America, ourselves, the citizens of America. It tells us emphatically that no new powers of any kind are _given_ to any state or to any collection of states or to their governments. It tells us that the American people, in making _their_ Constitution, left each state and each state government powerless, as they had been, alone or in combination with other governments, to interfere with the individual rights of any human being outside that particular state. And finally it tells us, what the Supreme Court has expressly declared to be the most important declaration in that Tenth Amendment, that we ourselves, the individual citizens of America, the “people” of the Preamble and of that Tenth Amendment, retain (secure from any valid exercise by any government or governments in the world and only capable of exercise by ourselves in our “conventions”) every power to interfere with the individual freedom of the American citizen except in the matters enumerated in the First Article.