It has been our custom, as average American citizens, to rely upon our leaders to know and urge, at the proper time and place, our protection under our American Constitution. We have seen the danger of such reliance in the record of our Congress of 1917. As many of our leaders are most renowned lawyers, the danger of that reliance is emphasized, if the briefs of those leaders and lawyers in 1920 disclose that they did not and do not know all these legal facts which are so clear and also so essential to our protection as American citizens. That we may ascertain whether these briefs do disclose this ignorance and do emphasize the danger of such reliance, we must later examine the briefs themselves. But, that we may come to such an examination, properly prepared, it is necessary that we should know the nature of the litigations before the Court and what were the arguments against validity upon which the Court was asked to pass. In no other way, can we acquire our own knowledge that the Supreme Court has yet to hear and consider the real challenge to the supposed new Article in which governments attempt to exercise ungranted power and to grant new power to interfere with the individual freedom of the American citizen. As we well know, that one real challenge is that the new Article was not made by those who alone _can_ make it, that it was not made as it _can_ be CONSTITUTIONALLY made, by the makers _of that kind of Article_ named in the Fifth Article, the “conventions” of the Seventh _and the Fifth_ Articles, the “We, the people” of the Preamble and “the people” of the Tenth Amendment. CHAPTER XXIII THE CHALLENGES THAT FAILED The validity of the Eighteenth Amendment (seven litigations being heard together) was argued on March 8, 1920, and for several days thereafter. As we are not concerned with the meaning of the second section of the Amendment or with the validity of the Volstead Act (passed by Congress under the grant of said section) except as the validity of the Act depends upon the validity of the Amendment, we shall make no mention of either.