It was, however, their fortune _and our own_ that their training and dominant purpose in life had been unique in history. Among them were men, who only eleven years earlier, at that same Philadelphia, in the name and on behalf of the American people, had enacted the Statute of 1776. As their presiding officer, in their effort of 1787, sat the man who had led the same American people in their successful effort, by the sacrifices of a Valley Forge and the battlefields of the Revolution, to make the declarations of that Statute the basic principle of American law. Prominent in the Convention was Hamilton, who had left college at seventeen to become a trusted lieutenant of the leader in that war which _did_ make that Statute our basic law. Among the delegates were quite a few others who had played similar parts in that same war for that same purpose. Most of the delegates had played some part, entailing personal sacrifice and effort, in that same war and for that same purpose. With such an education in the school whose training men find it impossible to ignore, the school of actual life, it was mentally impossible that this body of men could either forget or ignore or disobey the basic American law, which then commanded them and still commands us, that no government in America can ever have or exercise any valid national power to interfere with human freedom except by direct grant from its citizens themselves. If the education of the leaders of the present generation had been the same, American history of the last five years could have been differently written in a later chapter herein. Because the Convention was educated to know the Statute of ’76, the proposed grant of enumerated _national_ powers in the First Article was necessarily referred to the only competent grantors, the American people themselves, assembled in their conventions. Familiar as we are with the result of their effort to solve their great problem, a result told in the history of the ensuing one hundred and thirty-five years in America, it seems fitting here to have Madison describe the closing moment of that Philadelphia Convention, in his own words: “Whilst the last members were signing, Dr. Franklin, looking toward the president’s chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to a few members near him, that painters had found it difficult to distinguish, in their art, a rising from a setting sun. ‘I have,’ said he, ‘often and often, in the course of the session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the president, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting; but now, at length, I have the happiness to know that it is a rising, and not a setting sun.’” (5 _Ell. Deb._ 565.)