National Prohibition for the American people without a new grant of a new _national_ power directly from its own citizens. In the days of those earlier Americans, the _legal_ necessity of deriving _such_ power _directly_ from the _American_ citizens themselves was “felt and acknowledged by all.” In our day, among our leaders and our “constitutional” lawyers, there was none so humble as to know or honor this basic legal necessity. The other enumerated _national_ powers, which American citizens _ever_ gave their national government, are few in number, although they vested a vast and necessary ability in that government to protect the freedom of its citizens and promote their happiness and welfare by laws in certain matters. For our present purpose, they need only be mentioned. They require no present explanation. They are the power to make all treaties with foreign nations or governments; the power to regulate commerce, except the commerce within any one particular state; and the power of taxation. Having now some accurate conception of the limited and specific quantum of _national_ power which American citizens consented to grant in those earlier days, it is pertinent to our inquiry, as to whether we (their posterity) have again become subjects, to dwell briefly upon the reluctance with which they made even those grants. In considering that attitude, it is essential always to keep in mind the status of the citizens of each state, at that time, and their relation to their own _national_ government and the relation of each state to the _federal_ government of all the states. Under the existing system of governments, the citizens of each state were subject to no valid interference whatever with their own individual freedom except by laws of a legislature, _every_ member of which they themselves elected and to which they themselves granted every power of _such_ interference which that legislature could validly exercise. To those free men in those free states, men educated in the knowledge of what is real republican self-government, these two facts meant the utmost security of their human rights. No government or governments in the world, except their own one state government could interfere at all directly with those rights, and they _had given to_, and they could take from, that government _any_ power of that kind. As for the respective states and the relation of each to the federal government of all, each state had an _equal_ voice in the giving to or taking from that government any _federal_ power and each had an equal voice, in the _federal_ legislature, in exercising each valid _federal_ power. These existing facts, respectively of vast importance to the citizens of each state and to its government, influenced, more than any other facts, the framing of the new Articles, particularly the First Article, at Philadelphia and the opposition to those Articles in the conventions in which the people of America assembled.