The Sixteenth Amendment merely removed, in one respect, this _federal_ limitation upon the exercise of the national power of direct taxation granted by the First Article. The Amendment read: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” This Amendment, being nothing but a change in the _federal_ aspect of the Constitution, being a change in the protection given to each state as a political entity, was an Amendment which the state legislatures, each acting as attorney in fact for its own respective state, were entirely competent to make. The Seventeenth Amendment has no relation to human freedom. It merely provided that the state governments should no longer elect the august Senators in the American Congress, some of whom we shall meet later herein. This last Amendment, prior to 1917, provided that those Senators should be thereafter elected in our states by ourselves, the American people. Curiously enough, it is from the Senate in which they sit that came the proposal which caused the trouble which is obliging us to educate ourselves to find our “when” and “how” between 1907 and 1917 we became “subjects” instead of keeping our status as citizens of America. Early in our education (p. 26) we were informed that our public statesmen and constitutional thinkers brought to the year 1917 the false “knowledge” that legislatures in America, if enough combined, had the omnipotence over individual freedom, which the early Americans denied to the British Parliament. Their false “knowledge” was undoubtedly caused by their failure to appreciate, if they knew or remembered, that America is a _national_ union of men while there is also a subordinate and _federal_ union of states. Ignoring this simple fact, they also ignored the important fact that the Constitution is both _national_ and _federal_ and contains Articles _of both kinds_. Blind to both important facts, they acquired their false “knowledge” from the fact that the “legislatures,” to whom they ascribed omnipotence over individual freedom, had made the first seventeen Amendments. The fallacy of their deduction is mathematically demonstrable. A constitutional Article which gives to government any power to interfere with individual human freedom IS the constitution of government of men. That is why the First Article WAS the constitution of the government of the nation of men. And, in turn, _that_ is why the legal necessity of having it made by the men themselves, in their “conventions,” was “felt and acknowledged by all” Americans.