And so we find Sheppard, through all his opening support of the new constitution of government based on the Tory doctrine, making clear the necessity that our government keep that asset, which is the citizens of America, in good physical condition like any other machine that may be in America.
“In an age of machinery and of business transactions on a scale more enormous and complicated than ever before, the clear eye, the quick brain and the steady nerve are imperatively demanded. Society today is more dependent upon the man at the machine than at any previous period. We are coming to understand that the engine of the body must have the same care as the engine of the aeroplane, the battleship, the railway train, the steamship or the automobile; that the trade in alcohol is a form of sabotage which the human machine cannot endure; that it is no more to be tolerated than would be the business of making and selling scrap iron to be dropped into the delicate and complex machinery of modern manufacture, transportation and commerce.” (Congressional Record, Vol. 55, p. 5550.)
After this admirably accurate appreciation of the relation of our American government to the asset which is ourselves, Sheppard then proceeded to teach us (who have just lived through the education of the American human beings who made the Constitution) the real facts of that making, as he knows them.
He is advocating that our only American government should ask the legislative governments of the states, which are not the governments of American citizens, directly to interfere with our individual freedom and to grant to themselves and to our only government future power to interfere therewith on a matter not enumerated in the First Article. Naturally, as real fact would make manifest the absurdity of such proposal, he states that, when the Constitution was made, “by votes of the Southern States the power to amend the federal Constitution was vested in three fourths of the states.” Undoubtedly he meant us to understand that the Constitution (through whose real making we have just lived) was made by the states and that the Southern States granted to the legislatures of three fourths of the states the omnipotent ability over the human beings of America, which those human beings themselves had denied to the English king and his legislature. That he meant us so to understand we shall learn to a certainty in a moment. Meanwhile, let us note how inadvertently he states part of the truth, while omitting all reference to the part thereof which would make his own proposal the clear absurdity which it was.
We note his reference to that part of the Fifth Article which mentions the ability of three fourths of the state legislatures to amend the federal Constitution. Because we have lived through the days of the real American leaders, we recall that our Constitution is both federal and national and that state legislatures always had ability to make federal Articles and never had ability to make national ones. We also remember that those state legislatures were permitted, by the people who made our Constitution, to retain some of the ability they had and were given no new ability. We also remember that the Fifth Article mentions their existing ability to make federal Articles and prescribes, as the command of the people of America, that a “Yes” from three fourths of them shall validly make a change in the federal part of our dual Constitution. For which reason, with somewhat of amusement, we note Sheppard’s inadvertent accuracy of statement, when he says that three fourths of the state legislatures may amend the federal Constitution. With our knowledge, we do not care what he meant or intended that others should understand. We know that nothing has been more definitely settled in America, since 1776, than that legislative governments never can make a national Article or change our national Constitution.
We now come to that part of Sheppard’s oration in which he makes certain his remarkable “knowledge” that our Constitution was made by the states—which are political entities—and not by the people of America. With a complacency requisite in one who advocates that unique constitution of a new kind of government in America, government of the people by government without authority from the people, we find him quoting from Calhoun of 1833 the doctrine that the states made the Constitution. “In this compact they have stipulated, among other things, that it may be amended by three fourths of the states; that is, they have conceded to each other by compact the right to add new powers or to subtract old, by the consent of that proportion of the states, without requiring, as would otherwise have been the case, the consent of all.” (Congressional Record, Vol. 55, p. 5553.)
The history of America from May 29, 1787, to July 30, 1917, was clearly a sealed book to Sheppard of Texas on that later day.
On May 30, 1787, at Philadelphia, Randolph of Virginia offered the three Resolutions, which proposed that the people of America create a nation and absorb into their national system the federal union which had been made by the states. The first resolution was to express the sentiment of the convention “that the union of states merely federal will not accomplish the objects”; the second was to express the sentiment that “no treaty or treaties among the whole or part of the states, as individual sovereignties, would be sufficient”; and the third was to express the sentiment “that a national government ought to be established, consisting of the supreme legislative, executive, and judiciary.”
The work of that Philadelphia Convention was carried to a successful conclusion on the basis of those sentiments. When their proposed Constitution had been worded, it was sent to and made by the one people of America, not by the states.
The Constitution of the United States was ordained and established, not by the states in their sovereign capacities, but emphatically, as the Preamble of the Constitution declares, by the “people of the United States.”