There came a day, early in that memorable July, when all hope of continuing the Convention was almost abandoned, by reason of the difference of desire and opinion on this one subject. Let us average Americans of this generation remember that this one subject was merely the decision whether the people were to choose all the members of the legislature which was to exercise granted national powers to interfere with the human freedom of the citizens of America. Happily for all of us, there were many patriotic as well as able leaders at Philadelphia. From their patriotism and ability they evolved the compromise, on that question, which is expressed in their First Article. When it came from Philadelphia, it provided that each state should have equal representation in the Senate, senators to be chosen by the state legislatures, and that the House of Representatives should consist of members chosen directly by the citizens of America, in districts proportioned to the number of those citizens in it. No one has read the recorded debates of the Convention which proposed and the conventions which adopted our Constitution without learning that the Americans in those conventions knew that the grant of enumerated _national_ powers in the First Article WAS the constitution of the _American_ government of men. In and out of the Philadelphia Convention, the greatest and most persistent attack upon its proposal was the insistent claim that it had acted wholly without authority in proposing an Article which purported to grant _any_ such _national_ power to interfere with the human freedom of all Americans. Since July 4, 1776, no legislature or legislatures in the world had possessed _any national_ powers over all Americans. The Americans in each existing nation elected every member of the one legislature which had any such power over them. It was felt and stated at Philadelphia, it was felt and urged and insisted upon, sometimes with decency and reason, sometimes with bitterness and rancor and hatred, between the closing day at Philadelphia and the assembling of various Americans in each state, that the Americans in each state would be unwilling to give _any_ such _national_ power over themselves to any legislature whose members were not all elected by the people in that state. In all the conventions which adopted the Constitution, the one great object of attack was the grant even of _enumerated_ powers of a _national_ kind to a legislature whose members would not all be chosen by the Americans in the state in which the convention was held. The record of the Virginia convention fills one entire volume of Elliot’s Debates. Almost one-half of the pages of that volume are claimed by the eloquent attacks of Patrick Henry upon those grants of enumerated powers in that First Article. The basis of all his argument was the fact that this grant of national power in the First Article would make him and all his fellow Virginians, for the first time since the Declaration of