In this Statute, the American people clearly stated and definitely settled for all time the basic legal principle on which rests the validity of every constitutional article or statute law, which either directly interferes or vests ability in governments to interfere with an American in the exercise of his human freedom. There is nothing vague or ambiguous in their statement. The legal principle, so clearly stated and so definitely settled, is that no government in America can have any just power of direct interference with individual freedom unless such power be derived by direct grant from the Americans to be governed by the exercise of that power. That Statute has never been repealed. The Americans of that generation, throughout all the momentous political battles of the next thirteen years, when they were making and unmaking nations and creating a federation of nations, and later subordinating it to a union of human beings, never failed to obey that Statute and to act in strict conformity to its basic American principle. From the moment when that Statute was enacted by the supreme will in America, every American ceased forever to be a “subject” of any government or governments in the world. It was not until 1917 that any government or governments dared to act as if the American were still a “subject.” In that summer of 1776, as the Americans were engaged with their former Government in a bitter and protracted war, they had little time or thought to give, as one people, to the constitution of a government best designed to secure to themselves the utmost possible measure of protected enjoyment of individual human freedom. In their rebellion, they had delegated the management of their common interests to a committee of deputies from each former colony, which committee was called the Congress. By the declared supreme will of the whole American people, the Americans in each former colony now constituted an independent nation, whose human members were now the “citizens” of that nation. Under the declared basic American legal principle, it was imperative that any government should get its every valid power from its own citizens. Knowing this, the Congress, almost immediately after the Declaration of July, made the formal suggestion to the citizens in each nation that they constitute a government for themselves and that they grant to such government ability to interfere with their own human freedom in such matters and to such extent as they deemed wise. The manner in which the citizens of each nation acted upon this suggestion should have stamped itself so irrevocably upon the mind of America as never to have been forgotten by any later generation of Americans. The citizens of those nations were of the “people who were better acquainted with the science of government than any other people in the world.” In each nation they were creating the very essence of security for a free people, namely, a government with limited ability