authority as the rock on which this structure will stand. If this principle is unfounded, the system must fall.... With how much contempt have we seen the authority of the people treated by the legislature of this state!” (2 _Ell. Deb._ 443, _et seq._) But we cannot stay much longer in the Pennsylvania Convention. It would be unwise, however, for us to depart therefrom without hearing the accurate confirmation of our own reading and understanding of the Fifth Article from its own “apt, precise and classic English.” Wilson was explaining his opposition to the doctrine that a constitution is a compact between a master government and servant people. In other words, he was explaining the American Statute of ’76, stating the legal principle that Americans are not “subjects.” “The citizens of united America, I presume, do not wish to stand on that footing with those to whom, from convenience, they please to delegate the exercise of the general powers necessary for sustaining and preserving the Union. They wish a principle established, by the operation of which the legislatures may feel the direct authority of the people. The _people_, possessing that authority, will continue to exercise it by amending and improving their own work.” (2 _Ell. Deb._ 498.) To us average Americans this seems like sound American law and in strict keeping with our reading of the plain language of the Fifth Article, as we read it with the Americans in those old conventions. Wilson and his associates seem to know _with certainty_ that the Fifth Article is not to change all the free individual Americans into “subjects” of the legislative governments of which he speaks. Indeed, he calls all those free Americans, to some of whom he was speaking, “the citizens of America,” although the nation of America would not exist and they would not be its citizens until they and the Americans, _in_ eight other conventions, had said “Yes” to the Constitution they were discussing. Therefore, when he speaks of that Constitution as establishing a principle “by the operation of which the legislatures may feel the direct authority of the people” or “citizens of America,” and immediately adds that those citizens, possessing the _exclusive_ authority to exercise and vest ability to interfere with individual freedom, “will continue to exercise it by amending and improving their own work,” the enumerated grants of such authority in the First Article, we realize with certainty that he and his associates know that the Fifth Article in that Constitution does not mean that the legislatures (who are to feel the direct authority of the people) can thereafter exercise the authority of the citizens of America by altering, subtracting from or adding to the First Article quantum of delegated power to interfere with the individual freedom of the American people.