We cannot linger longer with these amazing briefs of the champions of the Eighteenth Amendment. From the viewpoint of unconscious humor, we have become rather enamored of the Wheeler idea that “state governments” and “the people of America” expressed the same thought to the latter when they made the Fifth Article. Since we read Wheeler’s brief, we have been trying the same method with some famous statements of great Americans. For example, we have this new excerpt from Washington’s famous Farewell Address: “The basis of our political system is the right of the ‘state governments’ to make or alter the people’s Constitution of government. And the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of ‘the legislatures of three fourths of the states’”--(Washington said ‘the whole people’)--“is sacredly obligatory upon all.” And we like particularly the improved Wheeler concept of the rather crude Gettysburg speech of Lincoln. In its new form, altered by the Wheeler idea, it is wonderful to hear the appeal of Lincoln that we, who were not among the dead at Gettysburg, should play our part “that government of the people, by the state governments, and for those who control the state governments, shall not perish from the earth.” We wonder if Hughes and Wheeler and Sheppard and Webb realize how far they have gone beyond the Calhoun idea that was repudiated forever at Gettysburg! In the old days, the Calhoun doctrine was that a single state, although but a political entity, could do as it pleased _in its own affairs_, even to leaving the Union without reference to the wishes of the citizens of America. That question was settled forever by the result at Gettysburg. The modern claim, the sole claim upon which the Eighteenth Amendment depends for existence, is that a state government, if it combines with enough other state governments, can go outside its own jurisdiction, outside the citizenship which chose the legislators in it, and issue its omnipotent command telling the citizens _of America_ what _they_ may do and may not do, “in all matters whatsoever.” But we leave the Court of 1920, quite satisfied that the modern “constitutional thinkers,” who filed their briefs therein, have not exactly the American concept of the relation of government to human beings, which would have located them at Valley Forge, with Marshall, in the Winter of 1778. We leave that Court, however, quite satisfied that the Court itself still has the knowledge which Marshall had, the knowledge stated in the Tenth Amendment and by the decision of that Court in 1907, that all the powers not granted by the Constitution to the general government at Washington “are _reserved_ to the _people_ and _can be exercised only by them or, upon further grant from them_.”