Our mirth entirely dispels our indignation, when we sense his full concept of the nature of that absurd Fifth Article “grant” to his government clients. That we may not mistake his concept, the most Tory concept ever stated as law in America since 1776, he explains it again and again in his briefs. It is his concept that the absurd supposed “grant” gives to his client governments, not one member of which is ever elected by the citizens of America, unlimited and constitutionally unrestrained power to interfere with the individual freedom of the American citizen on every matter or, as the Declaration of ’76 put it, in its complaint against the English King and _his_ legislature, to legislate for us on all matters whatsoever. And our mirth is not lessened when we read, in this brief, John Marshall’s full statement of the making of the Constitution (with the Fifth Article in it) and John Marshall’s clear decision that it was all made by the citizens of America, the “conventions” of the Seventh and the Fifth Articles. No statement of facts could ever be written, which more absolutely destroys the concept that the state governments have the omnipotence denied to the English Parliament, than the quotation from John Marshall which we read in this brief to support that concept. Throughout the quotation, with which _we_ are all very familiar, Marshall points out that there is a vital distinction, amazingly important to individual freedom, between the ability of the “conventions” (named by exactly the same name in the Fifth as well as the Seventh Article) and the limited ability of the same “legislatures” for which this counsel appeared in 1920. In the quotation Marshall points out that, when the American citizens are to make a NATIONAL Article, like the First Article and the Eighteenth Amendment, there is but one way in which they can make it “safely, EFFECTIVELY and wisely,” “by assembling in convention.” That all of us, including that counsel of 1920, may not find any excuse for an assumption that state governments can ever make Articles _of that kind_, Marshall dwells at length upon the _inability_ of state governments or any governments to make them or any Article like them. He tells us that, when the _American_ people make Articles _of that kind_, in the only way in which they can ever EFFECTIVELY make Articles _of that kind_, by assembling in “conventions,” “_they_ act _in_ their states. But the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease to be the measures of the people themselves or become the measures of the state governments.” “From these conventions the Constitution derives its whole authority.” “It required not the affirmance, and could not be negatived, by the state governments. The Constitution, when thus adopted, was of complete obligation and bound the state sovereignties.”