It may be but a coincidence that, while our American government was announcing its recognition of the wide-spread American disrespect for the new government edict, it is only a few days since throughout America there resounded many eulogies of the Samuel Adams, who made that statement in the Boston _Gazette_ of October 7, 1771. In those eulogies, there was paid to him the tribute that he largely helped to bring about the amazing result of American desire for individual freedom which culminated in the assembling of the Americans in the “conventions” which ratified the proposed Constitution. We have already sensed that the existence of the supposed Eighteenth Amendment depends entirely upon an amazing modern meaning _put into_ the Fifth Article made in those conventions. Let _us_, therefore, who are Americans now educated in the experience of the Americans who assembled in those “conventions,” sit therein with them and there read the story and the language of the Fifth Article as they read it when they made it. CHAPTER IX THE FIFTH ARTICLE NAMES ONLY “CONVENTIONS” It has been the misfortune of our prominent Americans of this generation that they read the Fifth Article with _preconceived_ notions of its meaning. To the error of that method of reading it, we average Americans will not pay the tribute of imitation. We know that its meaning to those who made it in the “conventions” of the earlier century is the meaning which it must have as part of the supreme law of the land. That we may read it as they read it and get its clear and only possible meaning, as they got it, we shall briefly review the story of its wording and its proposal at Philadelphia. That Convention immediately preceded the assembling of the people in their own “conventions.” In each of their “_conventions_,” among the people assembled, were some who had been prominent at Philadelphia, such as Madison and Randolph and Mason in Virginia, Hamilton in New York, Wilson in Pennsylvania and the Pinckneys in South Carolina. Moreover, between the Philadelphia proposal and the assembling of these conventions, Madison and Hamilton, proposer and seconder of the Fifth Article _at Philadelphia_, had been publishing their famous essays, now collectively known as _The Federalist_, in the New York newspapers to explain the Articles worded at Philadelphia and to urge their adoption. Under which circumstances, it is clear that, if we want to read and know the meaning of the Fifth Article as it was understood in those conventions, the Fifth Article which named those same “conventions,” we must complete our education by an accurate and brief review of the story of that Article at Philadelphia. Only in that way shall we average Americans of today be in the position in which were the Americans who made that Article.