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.
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.
When we read that story of Philadelphia, in relation to the Fifth Article, one thing stands out with amazing clarity and importance. We already know how that Convention, until its last days, was concentrated upon the hotly debated question of its own proposed grants of national powers in the First Article. In the light of which continued concentration, it is not surprising to learn that, until almost the very last days, the delegates forgot entirely to mention, in their tentative Fifth Article, the existing and limited ability of state legislatures to make federal or declaratory Articles, and mentioned only “conventions” of the people, who alone could or can make national Articles.