It must seem remarkable to us average Americans, with the education we have acquired at this point, to realize that _our_ leaders and “constitutional” lawyers have not known _why_ only we ourselves, in our capacity as citizens of America, can give any new national power to interfere with our freedom and that we, for such new giving, must act, in the only way in which the citizens of America “_can_ act safely, EFFECTIVELY, or wisely, on such a subject, by assembling in convention,” in our respective states, the very “conventions” mentioned for valid grant of such _national_ power in the Fifth Article of the Constitution made by the citizens of America, so assembled in such “conventions.” Before dwelling briefly upon the accurate appreciation of that legal fact displayed by those first citizens in everything connected with the making of that Constitution and that Fifth Article, let us realize how well the leaders and great constitutional lawyers of other American generations between that day and our own _did_ know this settled legal fact. After the Americans _in_ nine states had created the new nation and had become its citizens and had (in that capacity) granted the _national_ powers of its First Article, the Americans in Virginia assembled to determine whether they also would become citizens of the new nation. As the president of the convention, in which they assembled, they chose Edmund Pendleton, then Chancellor of Virginia. Very early in the debates, Henry and Mason, great opponents of the Constitution, attacked it on the ground that its Preamble showed that it was to be made by the people of America and not by the states, each of which was then an independent people. Henry and Mason wanted those peoples to remain independent. They wanted no new nation but a continuance of a mere union of independent nations. They knew that a constitution of government ordained and established by the one people of America, assembled in their respective “conventions,” as the Preamble of this Constitution showed _it_ to be, created an American nation and made the ratifying Americans, in each state, the citizens of that new nation. For this reason, the opening thunder of Henry’s eloquence was on that Preamble. “My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask, Who authorized them to speak the language of _We, the people_, instead of, _We, the states_? States are the characteristics and the soul of a confederation. If the states be not the agents of this compact, it must be one great, consolidated, _national_ government, of the people of all the states.” (Henry, 3 _Ell. Deb._ 22.)