22. In attempting, then, to understand the legislation of Congress, which is an exercise of delegated powers, it is also necessary to know the history of the times in which it was enacted. Thus the first ten amendments were added in response to a quite unanimous demand of the American people for what they considered at the time, 1789, an adequate protection of their fundamental rights. The Eleventh Amendment of 1798 grew out of the unwillingness of the people that a State should be made defendant in a federal court at the suit of a citizen of another State; therefore federal jurisdiction in such cases was denied. The Twelfth Amendment of 1804 was added to remedy a defect in the Constitution in the method and procedure of choosing the President and the Vice-President. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, of 1865, 1868, and 1870, were added because of the negro race. The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments, of 1913, were added after long agitation over direct taxation and the popular election of senators of the United States, the one essentially an economic, the other, a political question. The history of the times records how these amendments were brought about. So too does that history largely explain the legislation enacted by Congress by authority of these amendments.[58] 23. The essential fact as to the powers of Congress is of their limitation. Turning to the Constitution itself, one will find that it devotes nearly three times as much matter to legislative as to executive power; and nearly eight times as much matter to legislative as to judicial power. Doubtless this spatial distribution of powers (or limitation of powers) tells the whole story. Government is largely an affair of legislation. Essentially, government is the public business, controlled and administered for public or general purposes. Government, in a republic, may be said to express itself in laws. So important is this expression of the will of the sovereign, constitutional law consists almost wholly of the interpretation of legislation. This means that the principles of government are to be learned chiefly from the judicial decisions in particular cases; and this again means that the particular law having in due course come before the tribunal, that law, when tested by the supreme law of the land is sustained, or is declared to be without authority,—hence it is unconstitutional. In the final test, all legislation of Congress must stand the strain of this question: By what authority is this law made? We come then, sooner or later, in congressional legislation, to the supreme law of the land and to sovereignty in America,—“We, the people of the United States.”