These facts, however, reflect only on the virtue of the Amendment. They have no bearing upon its validity. We average Americans are interested now only in that claimed validity. We know that, if it is valid, we have become subjects, that we are no longer citizens. We are seeking to find out when and how that change was made in our relation to all governments in America. Beginning on July 4, 1776, we have come down to December 18, 1917. We have found ourselves, on that day, still citizens. We know that our servant legislature at Washington made a proposal on that day, which was legally absurd, unless we had already become subjects. We have listened carefully to what they had to say, in support of that proposal, and have ascertained that they neither knew nor understood the most important factor in our Tenth Amendment and Fifth Article, by which our ancestors kept their own and our status as citizens. We know that the state legislatures could not change that status. Therefore we now simply note the fact that, in 1918, some of them ratified the proposal on the basis that all of us were their subjects. We know that our own government at Washington has acted, whenever it felt disposed to enforce the supposed new command against us and not to disobey it openly itself, as if we _were_ the subjects of those ratifying legislatures. We know also that in 1920, after more than a year of exhaustive study of our history and our Constitution and our laws by hundreds of our most eminent lawyers, all working for one object, the legal demonstration of the invalidity of the new Amendment, a chosen number of the most renowned “constitutional” lawyers in America appeared in the Supreme Court and orally argued against validity and filed the briefs against validity which were the result of this concentrated effort. We know also that, in that court, on behalf of our own government and on behalf of those other governments which that government has proclaimed to be the supreme dictator in America, there also appeared another chosen array of the most renowned “constitutional” lawyers, in the forefront being a former justice of that court, now the American Secretary of State. This latter array appeared to demonstrate how and when, since 1790, our own status was changed from citizen to subject and the collective legislatures of some of the states were substituted for ourselves as possessors of the supreme constitutional will in America. We average Americans, therefore, to complete our education, now turn to the arguments of these lawyers and to their briefs, with somewhat of chagrin at our own unaided ability to ascertain the “when” and “how” _we_ became subjects and _our_ Constitution, in its _national_ Articles and aspect, became the creature of legislative governments, although the American people originally created it to be the master of all governments. CHAPTER XIX ARE WE CITIZENS?