That is why the Tenth Amendment, responsive to the demand of that Virginia convention and other similar conventions of the American people, names the citizens of the respective states as one class of reservees and the citizens of America as the great reservee and “most important factor” in the Tenth Amendment. This is the plain meaning of the language of that Tenth Amendment, to those who know what America is, where that language reads “to the states respectively, or to the people.” The word “respectively” is pointedly present after the word “states” and it is pointedly absent after the word “people.” Nothing could make more clear, to those who do not forget that the citizens of each state were the state itself, that the words “to the states respectively” mean to the respective peoples or citizens of each state and that the words “or to the people” mean to the people or citizens of _America_, in that capacity. CHAPTER V THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED We average Americans have now lived with those earlier Americans through the years in which they were educated to their making of the American nation, to their constitution of its only general government with _national_ powers. We have been with them in those early days when _legally_ they were subjects, inasmuch as their British Legislature at London had unlimited ability, _not delegated by them_, to interfere with the individual human freedom of each of them and all of them. We have realized that, in those very early days, despite their _legal_ status, those Americans were _actually_ and in substance citizens of their own respective communities, inasmuch as the legislatures which _actually_ did interfere with such freedom were the legislatures of their own choosing to which they themselves delegated such powers of interference. We have been with them when their British Government began its attempt to exercise its omnipotent ability. We have seen the inevitable result, the American Revolution, by a people, educated through actual experience in self government, against the attempt of any government to exercise a _national_ power not directly granted by its citizens. We have seen their invincible determination, in an eight year war of sacrifice, that no government in America shall ever have any _national_ power except by direct grant from its citizens. We have seen them, in their Statute of ’76--never repealed--declare this principle to be the basic law of America.