We average American citizens of this present generation must now feel qualified to understand the Constitution and its settled distribution of all _national_ powers to interfere with individual freedom. If these Americans could use their knowledge intelligently to make that amazing Constitution to protect our human liberty and their own, it cannot be beyond us, now also taught by their experience, to understand the protection which that Constitution gave to them and gives to us against even the usurpation of our own governments. Only by that understanding may we hope to keep that legacy of protection. No longer, now that we have acquired that understanding, can we make the great mistake of believing that the public leaders or lawyers of this generation are qualified to teach us anything about that protection. The experience of our leaders and lawyers has given them an entirely different education, in the science of government, than was the education of these earlier average Americans and _their_ leaders, than is our own education in having lived over again the days in which all valid grants of national power in constitutions of American government were made by the people themselves _because_ people and governments alike knew that _such_ grants could never be made by governments. The experience of public leaders and lawyers in America, for the past thirty years, has been almost exclusively concerned with property and with law and Constitutions in relation to property. In the Supreme Court, in the Slaughter House Cases, 16 _Wall._ 36 at page 116, Justice Bradley points out that the Declaration of Independence was the first political act of the American people in their independent sovereign capacity and that therein they laid the foundation of _national_ existence on the basic principle that men are created with equal and inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” He then goes on to state that “Rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are equivalent to the rights of life, liberty, and property.” We thus realize that the education of the Americans, who made all our constitutions, trained them to make Articles of government which would secure protected enjoyment of these three human rights. And we have learned that to those Americans, life and liberty came before property in importance.