Why not be sane and admit that the Fifth Article is not a “grant” to the legislatures of state citizens? It is settled fact that each such legislature, like every legislature in America, must get its every power to govern its own citizens _from_ its own citizens. That is why the Fourth Article guarantee of “a Republican Form of Government” to every state has taught us (pp. 250-1) the absurdity of the thought that the Fifth Article enables state governments outside Rhode Island to give its government power to interfere with the individual freedom of citizens of Rhode Island. And there is a further and more monumental absurdity, in this same respect, when we contrast this Fourth Article guarantee with the assumption that the Fifth Article is a “grant” to the state legislatures. One of the great purposes for which the whole American people made themselves one nation of men was that the strength of such a great nation might be used to secure to the Americans in every state the ability to govern themselves without any interference from outside the state, in all matters except those in which the citizens of America took from them the ability to govern themselves. That is why the citizens of America wrote that guarantee into the Fourth Article as a command to their inferiors, the states and the state governments. Having thus secured “a Republican Form of Government” to the Americans in every state by the command of the Fourth Article, is it conceivable that the same whole American people, immediately thereafter and in the Fifth Article, created for the citizens of America a government which has not even the semblance of “a Republican Form of Government”? That is the concept on which the existence of the Eighteenth Amendment depends. It is not in the Constitution unless, immediately after the guarantee of the Fourth Article and _in_ the Fifth Article, the whole people of America said: “We have just insisted that the Americans in each state must be governed by a government which gets its power directly from them. For ourselves, however, as the whole American people, we are content to let two thirds of Congress and the legislatures of three fourths of the states interfere with our individual freedom, in all matters whatsoever. For that reason, we make this grant to those legislatures. For ourselves, as one people, we have no desire for a Republican Form of Government.” Does not the claim that the Americans did say this in their Fifth Article entitle us more justly than Henry to exclaim: “I suppose that I am mad, or that my countrymen are so!” (3 _Ell. Deb._ 446.)