ds but the will of the convention.

The term ratification itself, because the term commonly used in
reference to treaties between sovereign powers, has been seized on,
since sometimes used by the convention, to prove that the constitution
emanates from the States severally, and is a treaty or compact between
sovereign states, not an organic or fundamental law ordained by a
single sovereign will; but this argument is inadmissible, because, as
we have just seen, the convention is competent to ordain the
constitution without submitting it for ratification, and because the
convention uses sometimes the word adopt instead of the word ratify.
That the framers of the constitution held it to be a treaty, compact,
or agreement among sovereigns, there is no doubt, for they so held in
regard to all constitution of government; and there is just as little
doubt that they intended to constitute, and firmly believed that they
were constituting a real government. Mr. Madison's authority on this
point is conclusive. They unquestionably regarded the States, prior to
the ratification of the constitution they proposed, as severally
sovereign, as they were declared to be by the old Articles of
Confederation, but they also believed that all individuals are
sovereign prior to the formation of civil society. Yet very few, if
any, of them believed that they remained sovereign after the adoption
of the constitution; and we may attribute to their belief in the
conventional origin of all government,--the almost universal belief of
the time among political philosophers,--the little account which they
made of the historical facts that prove that the people of the United
States were always one people, and that the States never existed as
severally sovereign states.

The political philosophers of the present day do not generally accept
the theory held by our fathers, and it has been shown in these pages to
be unsound and incompatible with the essential nature of government.
The statesmen of the eighteenth century believed that the state is
derived from the people individually, and held that sovereignty is
created by the people in convention. The rights and powers of the
state, they held, were made up of the rights held by individuals under
the law of nature, and which the individuals surrendered to civil
society on its formation. So they supposed that independent sovereign
states might meet in convention, mutually agree to surrender a portion
of t