As we go on with his oration of that July day, we find him insisting, as we found the House insisting on a later day, that the states and their legislative governments are all the protection to our individual liberties which the American people were able to attain by the efforts of those remarkable years from 1775 to 1790. Curiously enough, that insistence is mentioned in the same breath in which he suggests that we, the citizens of America, have some rights, evidently in the nature of privileges which a government confers on its subjects. This is what he has to say: “In refusing the people the right to appeal to the only tribunal having power of amending, the tribunal of the states, for the redress of what they consider one of the most terrible grievances in the republic, Congress would deny to them one of the most sacred of all rights, the right of petition.” Why should the supreme legislature not deny that right of petition to us, if the inferior state legislatures, who are not governments of the citizens of America, claim power to deny us any right they please, as they do by their supposed Eighteenth Amendment to our Constitution? But we waste time on this Sheppard. Let him say his own farewell to us; the citizens of America, in his closing words of July 30, 1917. As Webb, in the House, closed with his eloquent appeal to every true Mohammedan, we naturally find Sheppard closing with his appeal to whatever Tory sentiment believes that the same most important factor in the Tenth Amendment and the Fifth Article should be equally ignored. “At the close of this debate we will have an opportunity to enable the states to exercise their highest function--the right to shape, alter, and develop the federal Constitution. They are the proper tribunal to decide the fate of this Amendment. They compose the mightiest array of free commonwealths united in a federated whole the world has ever seen.... If there is anything in the Amendment subversive of _their_ liberties and _their_ welfare, _they_ can be trusted to condemn it. Let not Congress assume to judge for them. Let Congress discharge its preliminary task of submission and stand aside. Let it put in motion the referendum provided by the national organic law--the method of amendment the states themselves established when they created the Constitution. Let the states perform the duty which remains the sole instance of their sovereignty over the federal government itself.” (_Congressional Record_, Vol. 55, p. 5554.)