Anticipating the extraordinary concept which we are later to hear in 1917 and 1920, that the citizens of America by the Fifth Article made a collection of the state legislatures an omnipotent government over everything in America, including every individual right, we wonder if the constitutional thinkers of 1917 and 1920 remember that we are sitting with a people who, just five years before the conventions in which they and we sit, ended an eight-year war to make certain that there never again should be a government of that kind in America, to make certain that they themselves should never be the “subjects” of any government or the citizens of any nation whose government should have even one power to interfere with individual liberty, except power _of that kind_ granted directly by its citizens themselves. It was Maclaine in the North Carolina convention who first used the exact expression that the Americans, who sit in the conventions where we are, were a people “better acquainted with the science of government than any other people in the world.” In the same convention, on July 29, 1788, this is what he had to say about the consistent attack upon the Constitution, because it robbed the state legislative governments of so much of their previous power. “Mr. Chairman, that it _will_ destroy the state sovereignty is a very popular argument.... Government is formed for the happiness and prosperity of the people at large. The powers given it are for _their_ own good.... The powers to be given the general government are proposed to be withdrawn from the authority of the state governments, in order to protect and secure the union at large. This proposal is made to the _people_. No man will deny their authority to delegate powers and recall them, in all free countries.... It may be justly said that it [the Constitution which contains the Fifth Article] diminishes the power of the state legislatures, _and the diminution is necessary to the safety and prosperity of the people_.” (4 _Ell. Deb._ 180.) It certainly would have surprised Maclaine, as well as all the Americans in those conventions, to have heard any one of themselves stating that the same Constitution vested the state governments with an omnipotence they had never possessed, the very omnipotence denied to the British Parliament eleven years earlier.