In this convention, where the Americans in Pennsylvania are assembled, we have heard the consistent emphasis laid upon the fact that the Constitution is both a _federal_ and a _national_ Constitution, the distinction from all other constitutions so clearly recognized by the Fifth Article mention of the two makers of Articles. Later herein we will learn how this distinctive quality of our Constitution, this distinction recognized in its Fifth Article as well as in its Tenth Amendment, has neither been felt or acknowledged but has been wholly ignored by our modern “constitutional” thinkers for five years last past. At this point, therefore, it is well that we sit for a moment in the Virginia convention and listen to Henry, the greatest and most determined opponent of the Constitution before it was adopted. With our minds fixed upon the language of the Fifth Article and its clear mention of the exclusive existing ability of “conventions” to make national Articles, a mention emphasized by the equally clear recognition of the limited ability of the legislative state governments to make Articles which are _not_ national, it is interesting to hear Henry refer to the difference between _federal_ and _national_ Articles; and it is more than interesting, it is amazingly important to hear him proving, _by the fact that the Americans in Virginia are_ assembled in one of the “conventions,” that the Articles which have been just proposed from Philadelphia, _are national_ and, therefore, of the kind that legislative governments can never make. It is Thursday, June 5, 1788, the day on which began the immortal Virginia debate. For a year, since the proposal from Philadelphia, the new Articles have been the subject of the severest scrutiny on the part of those determined to secure the rejection of those Articles by the American people in Virginia. Throughout all America, these Articles have been examined and assailed and condemned in public writing and speech by those equally determined to secure their rejection by the Americans assembled in the other “conventions.” On the other hand, the same Articles have been explained and their necessity, if American individual liberty is to be secure, has been demonstrated in the famous essays which we now know as _The Federalist_, nearly all of which essays were the work of Madison and Hamilton, who are responsible for the wording and the meaning of the Fifth Article. Like the other “conventions,” assembling when all minds sought the best protection for individual liberty against oppressive governments, the members of the Virginia convention have been carefully chosen to speak the will of the Americans in Virginia by a simple “Yes” or “No” to these seven Articles, the first of which constitutes government ability to interfere with individual liberty.