The supposed Volstead Act was enacted under this grant. It has met with the severest criticism. No one, however, has yet pointed out one particular fact to the careful thought of every average citizen of America. There are thousands of laws, interfering with individual freedom, in the statute books of the American nation and of the respective states. In one respect, however, this Volstead Act is absolutely unique among statutes in America. It is the one law in America _of that kind_, the kind interfering with individual freedom, which does not even pretend to be founded on a grant of authority directly from its citizens to the government which passed it. It is the only law in America, directly interfering with human freedom, which was enacted under a grant of power made _by_ government to government. It does not detract from this unique distinction that the American government requested the grant, and the state governments made it, and the American government acted under it, by passing the Volstead Act, all being carefully planned and accomplished while millions of Americans were preparing to give and thousands of them did give their lives for the avowed purpose of securing human liberty from the oppression of government. When, in 1787, Americans at Philadelphia had worded our Constitution, Gerry, opening the short discussion of its Fifth Article, made this important and accurate statement of fact: “This constitution is to be paramount to the state constitutions.” All American citizens know that each state legislature is the creature of its state constitution and absolutely subject to that constitution. We thus have clearly established that the American Constitution is paramount to all the state constitutions and that each state constitution is respectively paramount to the state legislature which it creates and controls. It remained for the Congress of 1917 and all advocates of the Eighteenth Amendment to acquire and state and act upon the remarkable “knowledge” that those same state legislatures are paramount to everything in America, including the American Constitution, which is paramount to the state constitutions which created these very legislatures. That such was the unique knowledge of the Congress of 1917 is made clear by its request to those state governments to make the command of Section 1 to the citizens of America and to make the grant of Section 2 of power over the citizens of America. “We thought it wise to give both the Congress and the several states concurrent power to enforce this Article and let that power be set forth and granted in the Article we propose to submit.”