In its _then_ form it was the suggestion that, after or simultaneously with the state government exercise of an imaginary power to command the American citizens, those same state governments should vest in the only government of American citizens a future ability to make commands on the same subject, a subject not enumerated in the First Article. The Statute of ’76, the reasoning and the decision at Philadelphia in 1787 that _its_ First Article could only be made by the “conventions,” the clear and explicit statements in the Supreme Court (from Marshall to Brewer in 1907) that no valid grant of _national_ power could ever be made except by the “conventions,” the prescription in the Fifth Article of the _constitutional_ mode in which a “Yes” from three fourths of those conventions would validly make grants of _such_ power--all these things meant nothing whatever to the Senator from Texas or his colleagues in Congress, to the legislators in the various states, to government officials or to the “constitutional” lawyers who have discussed the Eighteenth Amendment. None of them realized the clear fact that, if government could get new power over human beings _from government_, the Americans, through whose education _we_ have lived, had wholly failed to achieve their one purpose, security of human freedom from any interference by government except under some power of interference directly granted by themselves to that government. Many of the colleagues of the Senator from Texas questioned the _wisdom_ of asking the grant on that subject. We know not one, however, who questioned the _ability_ of the proposed donors _to make_ the grant. We know not one who questioned as a fact that a fractional part of our state governments have the very omnipotence over the individual people of all America, which those earlier Americans denied to the British Parliament. Among _our_ “constitutional” lawyers, there were many who were engaged to combat in court the validity of the new Article. They questioned its validity on the ground that it took from the states, which are mere political entities, part of the power which each state had not surrendered. In this, they ignored the legal fact, settled by innumerable decisions, that the people of America, not the states, made the Constitution and all its grants of _national_ power. They questioned its validity on the ground that the power (to make constitutional Articles) “granted” (?) in the Fifth Article did not include the power to make fundamental changes in the Constitution. In this, they wholly ignored the certain fact that no such power _is_ granted in the Fifth Article but that two distinct powers, then existing, one limited and the other unlimited, are _mentioned and not granted_ in the Fifth Article, and a mode of procedure for the future exercise of each is prescribed. In all their challenges to the validity of the new Article, however, we know not one who ever knew or mentioned