We have seen that they gave to the new government, the only government of the citizens of America, naught but enumerated national powers, with the ability to make all laws necessary for the proper execution of those enumerated powers, and reserved to themselves alone—not to any government or governments in the world—all other possible national powers over the self-governing people, the citizens of America.
We have seen how they, the citizens of America, the possessors of the supreme will in America, then ended the complete independence of each of the thirteen nations but reserved to the citizens of each nation much of their former ability to exercise their own national powers of government over themselves, through their own delegation of such power to their only attorney in fact for such purpose, their own legislature.
We have seen those American citizens, while destroying the complete independence of those former nations, incorporate the former federation of states into their own system of a society or nation of all the human beings of America. We have seen them, in the constitution of their own national government, make it also the federal government of that federation and leave with it such federal powers as they themselves deemed wise. We know, therefore, as they knew in 1790 when their great distribution of power had become effective, that no legislature in America could exercise a national power not granted by its own citizens, and that no legislature or legislatures in America could give any national power to any government.
We average American citizens of this present generation must now feel qualified to understand the Constitution and its settled distribution of all national powers to interfere with individual freedom. If these Americans could use their knowledge intelligently to make that amazing Constitution to protect our human liberty and their own, it cannot be beyond us, now also taught by their experience, to understand the protection which that Constitution gave to them and gives to us against even the usurpation of our own governments. Only by that understanding may we hope to keep that legacy of protection. No longer, now that we have acquired that understanding, can we make the great mistake of believing that the public leaders or lawyers of this generation are qualified to teach us anything about that protection.
The experience of our leaders and lawyers has given them an entirely different education, in the science of government, than was the education of these earlier average Americans and their leaders, than is our own education in having lived over again the days in which all valid grants of national power in constitutions of American government were made by the people themselves because people and governments alike knew that such grants could never be made by governments. The experience of public leaders and lawyers in America, for the past thirty years, has been almost exclusively concerned with property and with law and Constitutions in relation to property.
In the Supreme Court, in the Slaughter House Cases, 16 Wall. 36 at page 116, Justice Bradley points out that the Declaration of Independence was the first political act of the American people in their independent sovereign capacity and that therein they laid the foundation of national existence on the basic principle that men are created with equal and inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” He then goes on to state that “Rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are equivalent to the rights of life, liberty, and property.” We thus realize that the education of the Americans, who made all our constitutions, trained them to make Articles of government which would secure protected enjoyment of these three human rights. And we have learned that to those Americans, life and liberty came before property in importance.
On the other hand, the leaders and lawyers of the present generation have been educated to think that property is the one important right which constitutions are made to protect. Wherefore it would be extraordinary if any of them knew that the American people constituted all their governments, and made their distribution of national powers among those governments and reserved to themselves many national powers, all for the main purpose of securing individual life and liberty, and then, the enjoyment of property. That these leaders and lawyers, so educated by experience, have not known these things or understood at all the constitutional Articles, an accurate understanding of whose meaning depends upon a knowledge which their education has withheld from them, the story of the last five years amply demonstrates. In its detail, that story and that demonstration will be later dwelt upon herein.
Fortunately, we average Americans of this generation have not received any wrong education in the relative importance of human life and liberty to property in the eyes of the American people who constituted all governments in America, and in the constitutions which those people made to secure all three human rights against even the usurpations of delegated power by the very governments which those constitutions created. Our wrong education in that respect has undoubtedly been attempted. The events of the last five years, however, while demonstrating the thoroughly wrong education of our leaders, have also shown that the average Americans still sense something extraordinary about governments exercising undelegated power over citizens of which they are not the governments and about governments claiming ability to give to themselves and to other governments undelegated national powers to interfere with individual human freedom. It has been entirely the result of the wrong education of our leaders and “constitutional” lawyers that we have not been told the legal fact that, and the constitutional reason why, these extraordinary performances on the part of governments in America have been just as void as they are extraordinary.
Now that we have turned from the unsound teaching of those wrongly educated leaders and lawyers and have educated ourselves by living with the earlier Americans through their making of all our constitutions of government, we are ready to approach, with clear and understanding minds, a brief consideration of the great Constitution proposed at Philadelphia and made by the citizens of America. Only by such brief but accurate consideration can we ever realize the distribution of delegated national powers between a supreme government—legislating for all American citizens—and lesser governments, each legislating only for its own citizens and without any power to legislate for American citizens. Only by such consideration can we realize the importance to us of the legal fact that the citizens of America, when making that distribution of granted national powers, reserved to themselves alone all other national powers to legislate for American citizens except those national powers granted and enumerated in Article I of our Constitution to the only national government of the citizens of America.