We commend a careful thought of this distinction, vital and important to individual human liberty, to the constitutional thinkers of 1917 and 1920. Whenever they read a Fifth Article which included the words “or in conventions in three fourths thereof,” they have assumed that two makers of Articles were named in the amending procedure of the Constitution (which is both _federal_ and _national_) in order that Congress, when _it_ wanted new power to interfere with individual freedom, might weigh the chance of getting it from each maker and then ask it either from those who reserved it exclusively to themselves, the “people” of the Tenth Amendment, or from those who never had it or the ability to grant it, the other reservee of the Tenth Amendment, “the states respectively” and their governments. Or perhaps it was the concept of these modern constitutional thinkers that the Fifth Article mentions two makers of Articles merely that Congress may choose either, according to its whim, as a fortunate golfer chooses between his two golf suits. That is their idea of the security to human individual liberty against government usurpation which Madison and Hamilton and the American people established about eleven years after they declared that no just power to interfere with human freedom could ever be obtained, except from the citizens with whose individual liberty the exercise of the power was to interfere! As Henry and his fellow Americans in the Virginia convention had no such absurd concept, we return to hear him charge that the Philadelphia Convention had exceeded its authority in proposing the Constitution of _national_ government and to prove that the proposed Constitution _was_ national by the fact that the Americans in Virginia are assembled in “convention” to say “Yes” or “No” to that Constitution, whereas, if it had consisted only of _federal_ Articles, it would have been sent to the legislatures. “The distinction between a national government and a confederacy is not sufficiently discerned. Had the delegates, who were sent to Philadelphia, a power to propose a consolidated government instead of a confederacy? Were they not deputed by _states_, and not by the _people_? The assent of the _people_, in their collective capacity, is not necessary to the formation of a _federal_ government.... They are not the proper agents for this purpose. States and foreign powers are the only proper agents _for this kind_ of government. Show me an instance where the people have exercised this business. Has it not always gone through the legislatures?... Are the people, therefore, in their aggregate capacity, the proper persons to form a _confederacy_? This, therefore, ought to depend on the consent of the legislatures, the people having never sent delegates to make any proposition for changing the government.” (3 _Ell. Deb._ 52.)