The experience of ages has taught that human liberty, even in a republic, is never secure unless the citizens of the republic themselves understand the basic security which protects that liberty. The writer of this book wishes to keep his own individual liberties secure against usurpation by any government in America. He wishes to keep his status, as such citizen, to all governments in America--the status established by the citizens of America through whose experience we have been educated. He knows that such status must end forever unless American citizens generally have the same earnest wish and, _of their own knowledge_, know _how_ the Constitution secures that status and their individual liberty. Shortly after the American people had chosen to be a nation with one government of enumerated powers, there came to that then land of individual liberty an Irish exile. Quickly he assumed his place with the great lawyers of America. And in the year 1824 he made clear that he would have been able to teach _our_ new citizens and _our_ public leaders _how_ the one American people “_did at last secure_ a government” which that one American people “could control despite” the state legislatures. In the argument before the Supreme Court in the famous case of Gibbons v. Ogden (9 _Wheat._ 1, at p. 87), where his opponent was Webster, this is how Emmett stated a fact _then_ known and “felt and acknowledged by all”: “_The Constitution gives nothing to the states or to the people._ Their rights existed before it was formed.... The Constitution _gives_ only to the general government, and, so far as it operates on the state or popular rights, it _takes away_ a portion, which it gives to the general government.... But the states or the people must not be thereby excluded from exercise of any part of the sovereign or popular rights held by them before the adoption of the Constitution except where that instrument has given it exclusively to the general government.” The italics are those of Emmett. What does this clear statement of fact (known by Emmett and his generation to be the exact statement of the Tenth Amendment) make out of every argument, whether for or against the Eighteenth Amendment, based on the assumption that the Fifth Article does give something to the states and their governments? Can any American citizen doubt that it makes clear that to describe such arguments by any other word save “nonsense” is to lend them a dignity which they do not possess? Without a single exception, every argument during the last five years, whether for or against the Eighteenth Amendment, has deserved the criticism of the Supreme Court for the fact that such argument neither knew nor considered the meaning of the Tenth Amendment.