The most important declaration in those amazingly important ten declarations, which secured the adoption of our Constitution, is the plain statement that every _national_ power to interfere with the human freedom of Americans, not granted in Article I, was reserved to the American people themselves in their capacity as the citizens of America. That is the explicit statement of what we know as the Tenth Amendment. In itself, that statement was but the plain and accurate echo of what was stated by the American people (who made the enumerated grants of such powers in Article I) in the conventions where they made those grants. Their statement was nowhere more accurately expressed, in that respect, than in the resolution of the Virginia Convention, which ratified the Constitution. That resolution began, “Whereas the powers granted under the proposed constitution are the gift of the PEOPLE, and every power NOT GRANTED thereby remains with THEM, and at THEIR will, etc.” (3 _Ell. Deb._ 653.) After the same statement had been expressly made (with authoritative effect as part of the original Constitution) in that Article which we know as the Tenth Amendment, it was again and again echoed, in the plainest language, from the Bench of the Supreme Court. As far back as 1795, in the case of Vanhorne’s Lessee vs. Dorrance, 2 _Dall._ 304, Justice Patterson stated that the Constitution of England is at the mercy of Parliament, but “in America, the case is widely different.”... A Constitution “is the form of government, delineated by the mighty hand of the people, in which certain first principles of fundamental laws are established. The Constitution is certain and fixed; it contains the permanent will of the people, and is the supreme law of the land; it is paramount to the power of the legislature, and can be revoked or altered only by the authority that made it. The life-giving principle and the death-dealing stroke must proceed from the same hand.... The Constitution fixes limits to the exercise of legislative authority, and prescribes the orbit within which it must move.... Whatever may be the case in other countries, yet in this there can be no doubt, that every act of the legislature, repugnant to the Constitution, is absolutely void.” To us average Americans, who have lived with those earlier Americans through the days in which they constituted their nation and distributed all _granted_ national powers between governments _in_ America and _reserved_ all other _general_ American national powers exclusively to themselves, the Virginia Resolution, the Tenth Amendment, and the quoted language of the Circuit Court are in strict conformity with the education _we_ have received.