In that same North Carolina convention, James Iredell, later a distinguished judge of our Supreme Court, in replying to the common attack that the Constitution contained no Bill of Rights, displayed clearly the general accurate knowledge that, in America, any grant of _national_ power to interfere with human freedom _is_ the constitution of government and that the citizens of any nation in America are _not_ citizens but subjects, _if_ even a single power _of that kind_ is exercised by government without its grant directly from the citizens themselves, assembled in their conventions. “Of what use, therefore, can a Bill of Rights be in _this_ Constitution, where the _people_ expressly declare how much power _they_ do give, and consequently retain all that they do not? It is a declaration of particular powers _by the people_ to their representatives, for particular purposes. It may be considered as a great power of attorney, under which no power can be exercised but what is expressly given.” (4 _Ell. Deb._ 148.) When we average Americans read the debates of those human beings, the first citizens of America, one thing steadily amazes us, as we contrast it with all that we have heard during the past five years. Some of those first citizens were distinguished lawyers or statesmen, quite well known to history. Some of them bore names, then distinguished but now forgotten. Most of them, even at that time, were quite unknown outside of the immediate districts whence they came. All of them, twelve years earlier, had been “subjects” in an empire whose fundamental law was and is that its legislative government can exercise any power whatever to interfere with human freedom and can delegate any _such_ power to other governments in that empire. The object of the American Revolution was to change that fundamental law, embodying the Tory concept of the proper relation of government to human being, into the basic law of America, embodying the American concept of that relation declared in the great Statute of ’76, that no government can have any power _of that kind_ except by direct grant from its own citizens. During that Revolution, human beings in America, in conformity with their respective beliefs in the Tory or the American concept of the relation of human being to government, had been divided into what history knows as the Tories and the Americans. Many of the human beings, assembled in those conventions of ten or twelve years later, had been sincere Tories in the days of the Revolution.