In these words, as always in the convention where we sit and listen to him, Henry attests the universal knowledge, common to advocate and opponent of the proposed Constitution, that the Constitution has not been referred to the state governments because of their absolute inability to constitute government of individuals, to give to government any power to interfere with individual liberty. In this, he and the others but echo the knowledge of the Americans at Concord, on that October day, eleven years earlier, where they returned a proposed Constitution with Articles _of that kind_ to the legislature which had proposed it. We recall their own statements that even a _supreme_ legislative government “either in their proper capacity or in joint committee, are by no means a body proper to form and establish a Constitution.” We recall their statements of the important knowledge that “a Constitution, alterable” even “by the supreme legislative, is no security at all against the encroachment of the governing part on any or on all their rights and privileges.” But we also hear, in these words of Henry, his knowledge--the knowledge of all Americans at that time--of something else interesting and important to us. We hear him twice identify the assembling of the American people, in the “conventions” named in the Seventh _and the Fifth_ Articles, as the people “in their collective capacity” and the people “in their aggregate capacity.” As we hear him, and as we hear Wilson in the Pennsylvania convention stating that “in this Constitution _the citizens of America_ appear dispensing a portion of their power,” as we hear similar statements in all those “conventions,” we sense the universal knowledge of all those conventions that they are the _American_ people, the citizens of the _new republic_. And later herein, with our education of 1790 completed by sitting in these very conventions, we intend to listen (with amazement and without the slightest belief) to the remarkable statements of 1917 and 1920, that the states, political entities, made our Constitution or that the citizens of the different states, in their capacity as _such_ citizens, gave to the _American_ government the enumerated First Article powers to interfere with the individual liberty of the citizens of that entirely different and greater nation, America. Impressed by Henry’s knowledge that the conventions which made the Constitution were the people of America, “in their collective capacity,” “in their aggregate capacity,” and impressed with Wilson’s knowledge that “the citizens of America”--not the states or the citizens _of the states_--“are seen dispensing a portion of their power,” we are going to laugh at the concepts of 1917 and 1920 and know that Marshall was right when he said, speaking of the American people and their assembling in those “conventions”: “It is true, they assembled in their several states, and where else could they have assembled?... When _they_ act, _they_ act