been repealed and the result of our Revolution reversed, in 1787, by the very “conventions” in which we have sat. It will be our amazement to hear that these “conventions” never created the citizen of America but that the American people, assembled therein, voluntarily made themselves “subjects” of the omnipotent government. And these modern “constitutional thinkers” will discuss this omnipotent government on the basis that those “conventions” made that particular government (not the one to whom the First Article grants its powers) attorney in fact for the general people of America, authorized to interfere with their individual freedom, “on all matters whatsoever.” To most of these men, it will be as if the Supreme Court, in countless ways, had _not_ declared: In this country, written constitutions were deemed _essential_ to protect the rights and liberties of the people against the encroachment of power delegated to their governments, and the provisions of Magna Charta were incorporated into bills of rights.... Applied in England only as guards against executive usurpation and tyranny, here they have become bulwarks against arbitrary legislation; but in that application, as it would be incongruous to measure and restrict them by the ancient customary English Law, they must be held to guarantee, not particular _forms of procedure_, but the very substance of individual rights to life, liberty and property. Of course, fresh from the conventions of old, we shall know that these men are talking nonsense. We shall know that the last two quoted statements from the Supreme Court, in Hurtado v. California, 110 _U. S._ 516, are but the expression of what was once the common knowledge of a people then “better acquainted with the science of government than any other people in the world.” But, as our knowledge shall be as the knowledge of the Americans of old, who fought an eight year war of sacrifice to make any such Tory concept in America absolute nonsense, it is well for us, while we are examining the nature of the first seventeen Amendments of our Constitution, to keep in mind one thing, which we now know and which, if it had not been forgotten, would have prevented the monumental blunder of the generation in which we ourselves are the American citizens. This one thing is the fact that the Constitution, made in the conventions we have just left, is a _federal_ and a _national_ Constitution. That fact and its influence upon the Convention, which framed the Fifth Article, and on the “conventions” of the American citizens, which made that Article, led them to provide, in their Fifth Article, the CONSTITUTIONAL mode in which state governments could exercise their existing limited abilities to make federal and declaratory Articles, like all the Articles of 1781 and like the first seventeen Amendments, _and also_ to provide therein the _constitutional_ mode in which the “conventions” of the American