Now we see the fallacy of the false “knowledge” which our statesmen and constitutional thinkers brought to the year 1917. Now we know the marvelous foresight of Hamilton when he stated his conviction that Amendments would relate to “the organization of the government, not to the mass of its powers.” None of the seventeen Amendments did relate “to the mass of its powers” to interfere with individual human liberty. That is why state legislatures, representing the federal members of the union of states, could make the federal or declaratory seventeen Amendments. The fact that those “legislatures” in 1787 could make Articles of that kind, as they had made them in 1781, did not deceive the Americans at Philadelphia into a false “knowledge” that those “legislatures” _could_ make the First Article with its enumerated powers to interfere with the individual freedom of the members of the nation of men. The fact that the same “legislatures,” still representing the members of the subordinate union of states, still could make declaratory or federal Articles, _and had made seventeen Articles of that kind_, not one of which constituted new government power to interfere with individual liberty, should not have misled the statesmen and constitutional thinkers of our generation. But it did. CHAPTER XV THE EXILED TORY ABOUT TO RETURN We have now educated ourselves accurately to know, at the beginning of 1917, what was our own relation to all governments and what was the relation of those governments to one another. With certainty, we know that those relations, at the beginning of 1917, were exactly what they had been at the close of 1790. It is amazingly important that we never forget that particular knowledge, when reading the story of what has happened since the beginning of 1917. With certainty, through our education we know that, _at both times_, the following was our own relation to all governments and the relation of each of them to the others. No individual in America was a “subject” of any government or governments. Each individual was a “citizen” of the nation which is America. The citizens of America, as such citizens, had given to their only government its enumerated powers to interfere with their individual freedom. Those American citizens had given these enumerated powers by direct grant from themselves, in the only manner, in which they can act effectively on such a subject, by assembling in their “conventions.” Those American citizens had made it the imperative law of America that no new power _of that kind_ (to interfere with their freedom) could be created except by the new exercise of their own ability _in the same manner_.