Naturally, we are not surprised to find a briefer who ignores this fact, possibly the legal fact in America most important to individual liberty, also indulging in the monumental error of the thought that these “conventions,” in their Fifth Article, made a grant, to _themselves_ and to his clients, of equal omnipotence over themselves, the citizens of America. We recognize that, if the Article was such a grant to his clients, the grant would have been the greatest grant ever made in the history of mankind. We recognize that it would have been a grant by three million free men, four years after the war by which they had become free men, surrendering to governments absolute control of every individual liberty and making themselves absolute “subjects.” We know that Hughes _did_ maintain that the one government created by or given any power in the Constitution, in which is the Fifth Article, had not power to forbid a candidate for Senator to do what he did. It is interesting and instructive to know that the same lawyer holds, as an axiom which needs no proof, that the same Constitution gave unlimited ability to his client governments to interfere with every individual liberty of the Americans who are not candidates for a Senatorship. We have the word of the man who wrote the language of that Fifth Article that it is merely “a mode of procedure” in which may be exercised either the existing unlimited ability of ourselves in “conventions” or the limited ability of the state governments to make _federal_ Articles. _We_ recognize, no one who reads it could recognize otherwise, that the Fifth Article, outside of two exceptions to CONSTITUTIONAL exercise of existing abilities to make Articles, contains nothing but procedural provisions. This knowledge we brought to the reading of the Hughes brief, after we had acquired the certainty in our education with the Americans who made the Fifth Article. Then we read this brief of the champion of champions for the validity of the supposed new Article and found therein the sheer assumption, as an axiom which needed no proof, that the Fifth Article, with nothing but its procedural provisions, was a grant of omnipotence to his government clients over ourselves! Imagine, therefore, our amazement _and our amusement_, in the same brief, to find this clear echo of the statement of Madison and of our own knowledge, this accurate and complete statement of exactly what the Fifth Article contains: “Article V, _apart from procedural provisions_, contains two limitations of the power to amend, as follows: ‘Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior, etc.’” If, “_apart from procedural provisions_,” the Article has nothing but “two limitations” of existing abilities to make Articles, where does he or anyone find in it the greatest “grant” known to the history of mankind?