But, whatever the ignorance of our constitutional lawyers, _we_ know why Madison, in his Fifth Article, mentions these “conventions” in which free inhabitants are seen deliberating on new grants or constitutions of government power to interfere with individual freedom. When future grants of such power are suggested, there is to be a CONSTITUTIONAL mode prescribed for the reassembling of such “conventions” to make or refuse the grants. Our experience with Madison and his colleagues would educate these “constitutional” lawyers to keen realization that the Americans of old knew the vital distinction, so important to individual liberty, between permanent and existing state legislatures and these “conventions” of the American people themselves, chosen for the one purpose of answering “Yes” or “No” to a particular question previously carefully considered by all the American citizens. Let these “constitutional” lawyers spend a moment with Hamilton, on Friday, March 14, 1788, when he was urging the American people to adopt the Constitution with that Fifth Article. He was discussing the mode which that Constitution provided for the election of the Chief Executive of the new nation. The mode was that the _American_ citizens, in each state, should elect a temporary convention of delegates to deliberate upon and cast the votes of Americans in that state for some American as President. We sense, at once, the striking similarity between the temporary body, thus to be chosen for _that_ purpose, and the temporary body or convention also to be chosen to pass upon the _other_ single question, a “Yes” or “No” to some particular proposed new grant of government power to interfere with individual freedom. The danger to individual liberty would necessarily be much less in having a permanent government body, the legislature, cast the vote of the Americans in its state _for an Executive_, than in having the same permanent government body or legislature say the “Yes” or “No” of the Americans in that state _to a new grant of government power_ to interfere with the individual liberty of all Americans. Therefore, if we find Hamilton dwelling upon the danger of state legislatures casting American votes for the American Executive, we can be quite certain that neither Madison nor Hamilton nor their colleagues _mentioned_ the existing ability of legislatures to make _federal_ Articles (when these men worded and made their Fifth Article) in order that their words might be twisted away from any possible English meaning and say that the citizens of America appointed these state governments, not a member of which is chosen by the citizens of America, to be their omnipotent attorney in fact for every purpose in the world, forever.