This Wheeler believes that the Statute of ’76 is “one great muniment of our liberty which can never be amended, revoked or withdrawn.” He says so in his brief. He also maintains that his state governments, not one of their members elected by us as citizens of America, have omnipotent power over our every liberty, except that they cannot change the number of senators from each State. At one point in his brief he “proves” overwhelmingly that the citizens of America universally demanded his new Article, the Eighteenth Amendment. His proof is--and we cannot deny the fact which he asserts as proof--that, in the year 1918, when Americans were in the Argonne Forest in France, four thousand seven hundred and forty-two Tories in forty-five state legislatures said “Yes” to this new command to the one hundred million American citizens on a subject not among the matters enumerated in our First Article. That his “proof” might be perfect (for the claim that the making of the command was demanded by the citizens of America) he fails to mention the fact that not one of those four thousand odd Americans, who were not the Americans in the Argonne or in our training camps preparing to fight for human liberty, was elected for any purpose by the citizens of America. Reflecting upon this briefer’s admiration for the Statute of ’76 and upon his knowledge that the “legislatures” never are the people, while the “conventions” of the Fifth Article are the “people,” we wonder if he ever read a certain statement of the early American who wrote the Statute of ’76. It is a statement from Thomas Jefferson quoted by Madison, author of the Fifth Article, when he was urging the American people or “conventions” to make that Fifth Article. Jefferson was talking about a constitution, in which “all the powers of government ... result to the legislative body,” as they result (under the modern assumption as to what the Fifth Article says) to the state governments, the new omnipotent legislature of the American people. This is what Jefferson had to say, what Madison approved: “The concentrating these in the same hands, is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation, that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one.... As little will it avail us, that they are chosen by ourselves. An _elective_ despotism was not the government we fought for.” (_Fed._ No. 48.) It is clearly the view of Wheeler and all his associates that the early Americans did fight their Revolution so that we might have, in these modern days, an elective despotism of four thousand seven hundred and forty-two despots. That form of government is probably relieved from the odium of the Madison and Jefferson attack, by the “alleviation” that we ourselves, the citizens of America, those to be governed by this “_elective despotism_,” do not elect or choose even one of the despots!