And so we find the Wheeler brief stating that the new Amendment, made entirely by governments without any authority from the people about whom he prates, “is generally recognized as the greatest piece of constructive _legislation_ that was ever adopted by a self-governing people”; and we turn over the pages of the brief and we find the remarkable proposition that these state legislatures, when making the Eighteenth Amendment, were not _legislating_, but were “a body of representatives sitting in a conventional capacity.” Of course, we now learn, by this latter statement, that the greatest piece of “constructive legislation” the world ever knew was not legislation at all. But we also learn a more important thing. It would have been of great advantage to the British Parliament in 1765, if it had only known the Wheeler concept of our American security for human freedom. Think how remarkable it would have been to have passed a Stamp Act which would have been universally respected and obeyed by the American people of that time! All the British Parliament should have done was to announce: “This is not passed by us as a legislature. In issuing this command to the American people, we are a ‘body of representatives sitting in a conventional capacity.’” Having exactly the same attitude mentally as Lord North in 1775, this Wheeler would have been a better Minister for the English King. He would have been able to keep for him the American “subjects” of the British Legislature. “Article V itself shows that the representative or convention idea was in the minds of the framers of the Constitution. If the legislatures of two thirds of the states should apply to Congress, then Congress would be obliged to call a convention for proposing Amendments to the Constitution. Then, also, when it came to the matter of ratification, this question could be considered by conventions in the various states. A review of the proceedings of the constitutional convention, as well as a study of the political and governmental bodies at the time at which the provision providing for amending the federal Constitution was adopted, revealed the fact that these men thought in terms of conventions ... _and that the clear intent of the framers was to ratify proposed amendments by bodies sitting in the capacity of conventions_. The Court will not find any able exponent of the theories of government of that time, however, _who even asserted that the people could be considered as a portion of the legislature_. This can be shown most clearly by an examination of the proceedings of the constitutional convention, as reported by Mr. Madison and particularly by examining the various proposals advanced in that convention for the ratification of the Constitution.”