make articles which were not _national_. As a matter of fact, it was only at the last moment, in the Convention, that Madison and Hamilton, remembering this _limited_ ability of those legislatures, wrote into Article V any mention of it and its future constitutional exercise. As the story of the First, Fifth and Seventh Articles, at Philadelphia in 1787, will be more fully treated hereinafter, we leave them now to continue the brief story of the voluntary and direct action of the Americans themselves, by which they created the nation that is America, became _its_ citizens and, _as such_, vested its only government with its enumerated _national_ powers. When the Philadelphia Convention, on September 17, 1787, had completed its voluntary task of wording the proposed Constitution of a nation and its supreme government of enumerated powers, the proposed Constitution was referred to the American people, for their own approval or rejection, assembled in their conventions. In many respects, the Philadelphia ascertainment of the legal necessity that it _must_ be referred to those people themselves and the Philadelphia decision to that effect, following that ascertainment, constitute the most important and authoritative legal reasoning and decision ever made in America since July 4, 1776. Both reasoning and decision were naturally based upon the fact that the First Article purports to give _national_ powers to Congress to make laws, interfering with the individual freedom of the citizens of America. In the face of that decisive fact, it was impossible for the Americans at Philadelphia, who had worded that proposed Article with its grant of enumerated powers _of that kind_, to have made any other legal decision than a reference of such an Article to the American people themselves assembled in their conventions, as the only competent grantors of any _national_ power. The Americans at Philadelphia were human beings of exactly the same type as all of us. They had their human ambitions and differences of opinion and jealousies. They were not supermen any more than we are. They were grappling with tremendous problems along an uncharted way in the comparatively new science of self government by a free people, sparsely settled along the extensive easterly coast of a continent and, at the time, citizens of thirteen distinct and independent nations. Their personal ambitions and differences of opinion and jealousies, for themselves and their respective nations, made the problem, which they set themselves to solve, one almost unparalleled in history. If they had wholly failed in their effort, as men with any other training and dominant purpose in life would certainly have failed, no just historian would ever have attributed such failure to any lack of intelligence or ability or patriotism on their part.