In the same M’Culloch v. Maryland, Marshall pays a tribute to an accurate knowledge, which we have acquired in our education with the early Americans. It is the knowledge that everything in the Constitution denies any ability in even all the states _as such_, or in all the state governments, each of which is never anything but a government of the citizens of _one_ state and _their_ attorney in fact as _state_ citizens, to alter in any way the NATIONAL part of _our_ Constitution (which Constitution is both _national_ and _federal_) because the NATIONAL part relates to direct interference with the individual freedom of the _American_ citizens. This is his tribute to the truth of the knowledge which we have acquired. He says that there is “a principle which so entirely pervades the Constitution, is so intermixed with the materials which compose it, so interwoven with its web, so blended with its texture, as to be incapable of being separated from it without rending it into shreds. This great principle is, that the Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof are supreme; that they control the Constitution and laws of the respective states and cannot be controlled by them.” And so we average Americans find naught but encouragement in the brief of Hughes. From its quotations, from its every statement, we learn that we have known all the facts, before we read it, and that we are free citizens and not “subjects.” In that brief of the champion of champions of the governments that “made” the new NATIONAL Article, we learn that there are no new facts on which to base the claim that we, the whole people of America, have another government besides the government of enumerated powers, the claim that we are “subjects” and that our new omnipotent Parliament wears the aspect of thirty-six inferior governments, each elected by the citizens of a nation which is not America. In the brief of this champion, we find no pretense that there is any support for this weird claim. On the contrary we find the whole claim depending entirely upon the sheer assumption--asserted as if to state it was to state an axiom--that the Fifth Article _is_ a “grant,” wherein the “conventions” grant _to the grantors_ and to the state governments ability to exercise omnipotence over the American citizens, ability to interfere with their individual freedom, in any matter whatsoever.