If we go back to the “conventions” of those who established the system, we find a striking fact. In those “conventions” there were many men whose personal opinion always had been and still was in full accord with the Tory concept of what _ought_ to be the relation of government to human being. But these men, with that Tory concept of what government ought to be, were just as keenly aware as were those with the American concept, that the Tory concept had forever disappeared from American law. Whenever any suggestion was based upon the Tory concept, these very men were among the quickest to perceive and the most strenuous to insist that the suggestion could not be met because the American concept had displaced the Tory concept forever in America. If our modern leaders, who have the same Tory concept of what government _ought_ to be, had evinced the same perception and the same insistence, the story of the last five years would be a different story. Because these leaders have had no knowledge of what America is, we average Americans must now come straight from the “conventions” in which the Americans established the Constitution to secure individual freedom and we must educate ourselves in the story of the last five years in which our governments and our leaders have calmly assumed that citizens are subjects. CHAPTER XVI THE TORY “EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT” In the closing month of 1917, the American people had been for eight months participants in the World War. In that winter, under the direction of their only government, exercising its war power, they were marshalling all that they had to win that war and to win it quickly. The mind of the people themselves was concentrated on that one purpose. The response of the average American citizen to the call of his government, the assembling of millions of average American citizens as soldiers for that war, the outpouring of their money by other millions, should have made it impossible that the government servant of those American citizens should have entirely forgotten and ignored the knowledge of the “conventions” of 1787, that the American is a citizen and not a subject. Even if their personal experience had made them members of the class which naturally have the Tory mental attitude, the spirit of 1917 should have awakened our legislators from their wrong Tory concept of our American basic law. If plain words were needed to teach them that basic law, only ten years earlier the Supreme Court had stated that law in words which even a child can understand. The powers the people have given to the general government are named in the Constitution, and all not there named ... are reserved to the people and can be exercised _only by them_, or upon further grant _from them_. (Justice Brewer, in the Supreme Court, 1907, Turner v. Williams, 194 _U. S._ 279.)