What, however, are we to think of the Tory education of so many of our leaders and “constitutional” lawyers, who have calmly accepted and acted upon the amazing assumption that state governments in America can exercise and can grant to other governments any or all general national powers to interfere with the human freedom of American citizens, including even the national powers expressly reserved by those citizens to themselves in the Tenth Amendment?
If they adopt their familiar mental attitude that all these statements were made more than a hundred years ago and have no meaning or weight now, we refer them to the Supreme Court, in 1907, when it stated:
The powers the people have given to the General Government are named in the Constitution, and all not there named, either expressly or by implication, are reserved to THE PEOPLE and can be exercised only by THEM, or UPON FURTHER grant from them. (Justice Brewer in Turner v. Williams, 194, U. S. 279.)
For ourselves, we average Americans turn now to examine in detail how clearly the Americans at Philadelphia in 1787 did know and obey the basic law of America that all national powers to interfere with individual freedom are the powers of the people themselves and can be exercised only by them or upon direct grant from them. We find their knowledge, in that respect, evidenced by an examination of the reasoning by which they reached the correct legal conclusion that their proposed grants of general national powers, in their First Article, could only be made by the citizens of America themselves, assembled in their “conventions”—that grants of such powers could not be made even by all the legislatures of the then independent states.
CHAPTER VII
PEOPLE OR GOVERNMENT?—CONVENTIONS OR LEGISLATURES?
It is no longer open to question that by the Constitution a nation was brought into being, and that that instrument was not merely operative to establish a closer union or league of states. (Justice Brewer, in Supreme Court, Kansas v. Colorado, 206 U. S. 46 at page 80.)
Instructed by living through the education of the earlier Americans to their making of that Constitution, we accurately know that they themselves, by their own direct action, brought that new nation into being. Through our course in their education, we have their knowledge that only the men, who are to be its first members, can create a new political society of men, which is exactly what any American nation is. “Individuals entering into society must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest.” So said the letter which went from Philadelphia with the proposed Articles whose later adoption created the new nation and vested the delegated and enumerated national powers of its government to interfere with the liberty of its citizens, (1 Ell. Deb. 17.)
Furthermore, through our own personal experience, we understand how all societies of men are brought into being. There are few of us who have not participated in the creation of at least one society of men. Most of us have personally participated in the creation of many such societies. For which reason, we are quite well acquainted with the manner in which all societies of men are brought into being. We know that ourselves, the prospective members of the proposed society, assemble and organize it and become its first members and constitute the powers of its government to command us, its members, for the achievement of the purpose for which we create it.
For one simple reason, the Americans, through whose education we have just lived, were “better acquainted with the science of government than any other people in the world.” That reason was their accurate knowledge that a free nation, like any other society of individuals, can be created only in the same manner and by its prospective members and that the gift of any national powers to its government can only be by direct grant from its human members. This is the surrender “of a share of their liberty, to preserve the rest.”
The knowledge of those Americans is now our knowledge. For which reason, we know that they themselves created that new nation and immediately became its citizens and, as such, gave to its government all the valid and enumerated national powers of that government to interfere with their and our human freedom. We know that they did all these things, by their own direct action, “in the only manner, in which they can act safely, effectively or wisely, on such a subject, by assembling in conventions.”