This remarkable letter then goes on, paragraph by paragraph, to suggest that, in the new Articles, the principle of representation be changed, so as not to be the same for every state; the new government be given “positive and complete” _national_ power “in all cases where uniform measures are necessary”; the new government keep all the federal powers already granted; the judicial department of the new government be nationally supreme; the legislative department be divided into two branches; the new government have an executive department; there be an Article guaranteeing each state against internal as well as external dangers. In other words, the letter reads like a synopsis of the principal provisions of our present Constitution, although the letter was written over a month before the Philadelphia Convention began to draft that Constitution. One paragraph in that remarkable letter is very important as the first of many similar statements, with the reasons therefor, made by Madison in the Philadelphia Convention, in the Virginia convention which ratified the Constitution and in _The Federalist_ which urged its ratification. Madison was writing his letter within a few short years after the American people had made their famous Statute of 1776. He knew its basic law that every ability in government to interfere with individual freedom must be derived directly by grant from those to be governed. He knew that governments could give to government _federal_ power to prescribe rules of conduct for nations. He also knew that governments could not give to government any power to prescribe rules of personal conduct which interfered with the exercise of individual human freedom. In other words, he knew the existing and limited ability of legislatures to make _federal_ Articles and that such limited legislative ability was not and never could be, in America, competent to make _national_ Articles. He also knew the existing ability of Americans themselves, assembled in their conventions, to make any kind of constitutional Article, whether it were federal or national. He knew that the limited ability had been exercised in making the _federal_ Articles of the existing federation and that the unlimited ability had been exercised, in each existing nation, in making its _national_ Articles.