Volume 4, P. 781, They Are Stated to Have Been Presented to That Body,

as having passed in the Convention on September 17 immediately after the signing of the Constitution.” (5 Ell. Deb. 602.)

This is the Resolution:

“RESOLVED, That the preceding Constitution be laid before the United States in Congress assembled; and that it is the opinion of this Convention, that it should afterwards be submitted to a convention of delegates chosen in each state by the people thereof, under the recommendation of its legislature, for their assent and ratification; and that each convention, assenting to and ratifying the same, should give notice thereof to the United States in Congress assembled.

“RESOLVED, That it is the opinion of this Convention, that, as soon as the conventions of nine states shall have ratified this Constitution, the United States in Congress assembled should fix a day, etc.” (5 Ell. Deb. 541.)

This Resolution is the most authoritative statement of the legal conclusion reached by these leaders of a people then “better acquainted with the science of government than any other people in the world.” The conclusion itself was compelled by accurate knowledge that the government of “citizens” can validly obtain only from the citizens themselves, by their direct grant, any power to interfere with their individual freedom. The expression of that knowledge, in the Resolution, is, in many respects, one of the most important recorded legal decisions ever made in America. We average Americans, educated with those Americans at Philadelphia through their experience of the years between 1775 and 1787, cannot misunderstand the meaning and importance of that decision. Instructed by our review of their actions and their reasoning at Philadelphia in reaching that conclusion and making that legal decision, we know, with an accurate certainty, that it was their declaration to the world and to us that no proposal from Philadelphia suggested that Americans again resume the relation of “subjects” to any government or governments.

Our minds impressed with this accurate knowledge that such was not their purpose, we now prepare to complete our education as American citizens, not subjects, by reading the Philadelphia story and language of their Fifth Article, their only other Article which even partly concerned the future grant of new government power to interfere with individual American freedom. By reason of our education, we will then come to the reading of the language of this Article, as the Americans read it and understood it when they made it in their “conventions” that followed the proposing convention of Philadelphia.

Being educated “citizens” and not “subjects,” we ourselves will no longer, as our leaders have done for five years, mistake the only correct and legal answer to the indignant outburst of Madison, who wrote this Fifth Article at Philadelphia. “Was, then, the American Revolution effected, was the American Confederacy formed, was the precious blood of thousands spilt, and the hard-earned substance of millions lavished, not that the people of America should enjoy peace, liberty, and safety, but that the governments of the individual states, that particular municipal establishments, might enjoy a certain extent of power, and be arrayed with certain dignities and attributes of sovereignty? We have heard of the impious doctrine in the Old World, that the people were made for kings, not kings for the people. Is the same doctrine to be revived in the New, in another shape--that the solid happiness of the people is to be sacrificed to the views of political institutions of a different form?” (Fed. No. 45.)

The American answer, from the people of America assembled in the conventions that ratified that Fifth Article, was a clear and emphatic “No.” The Tory answer of the last five years, from our leaders and our governments, has been an insistent “Yes.”

No one, however, with any considerable degree of truthfulness, can assert that there has come from the American people themselves, during the last five years, any very audible “Yes.” To whatever extent individual opinions may differ as to the wisdom or legality of the new constitution of government of men, made entirely by governments, no unbiased observer has failed to note one striking fact. By a very extensive number of Americans otherwise law-abiding, Americans in all classes of society, the new government edict, the government command to “subjects,” has been greeted with a respect and obedience strikingly similar to the respect and obedience with which an earlier generation of Americans received the Stamp Act and the other government edicts between 1765 and 1776.

When the Americans of that earlier generation were denounced by the government which had issued those edicts to its “subjects,” one of the latter, five years before Americans ceased to be “subjects” of that government, stated: “Is it a time for us to sleep when our free government is essentially changed, and a new one is forming upon a quite different system--a government without the least dependence upon the people?”

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.