In our gratitude for such remembrance, we ignore the inaccuracy of a suggestion that the “legislatures” of the Fifth Article are the agent of the principal therein mentioned, the “people” of America, the “conventions” which made the Constitution. Each of those “legislatures” is an agent of one particular reservee among those named collectively in the reservation of the Tenth Amendment in the words “to the states _respectively_,” while the “conventions” in the Fifth Article is the one most important reservee in that Tenth Amendment, “the people” of America, the most important factor in that Tenth Amendment and in America. For the purpose of making any Articles, whether federal or national, that important reservee has no legislative agents. For any purpose, it has but one legislative agent, the Congress; and to that one legislative agent it has given no power to _make_ any constitutional Articles; but it has, in the Fifth Article, _left_ with that agent the mere ability to _draft_ and _propose_ a new Article of either kind and, as did the Philadelphia Convention, from the nature of the Article it drafts, whether within the ability of “legislatures” or within the exclusive unlimited ability of the people or “conventions,” to _ascertain_ and _propose_ which shall make the drafted Article. That the state legislatures are not agents of the American citizens, in that capacity, is self-evident. Each legislature is chosen by the citizens of a state. Moreover, the Constitution itself distinctly states that the “conventions” of the American citizens grant no power of any kind therein to the state “legislatures.” When the American people created a national legislature, with certain enumerated powers, it was neither necessary nor proper to define the powers retained by the states. These powers proceed, _not from the people of America_, but from the people of the several states; and remain, after the adoption of the Constitution, what they were before, except so far as they may be abridged by that instrument. (Marshall in Sturges v. Crowinshield, 4 _Wheat._ 122.)