Constitution relating to conventions. They said; 



"No Convention of the People shall be called by the General 

 Assembly, unless by the concurrence of two-thirds of all the 

 members of each House of the General Assembly," 

 And that is all they said on the subject, They were not grant- 

 ing to the people any new power or privilege, Four conventions 

 (including that of 1835) had written and revised the Constitution 

 of this State before the Constitution itself ever contained a word 

 on the subject of convention. They provided a mechanism for cal- 

 ling a convention, but made no attempt to define or limit the 

 powers of a convention, once assembled. This was proper, for the 

 convention was not the creature of the Constitution; the Consti- 

 tution was the creation of conventions, and it would have been a 

 vain thing to have bounded the authority of a convention by the 

 terms of an instrument which a convention could alter at its pleasure. 



Absent limitations imposed by the people themselves, a con- 

 vention of the people of North Carolina could completely discard 

 the Constitution of this State and write a new one, rearranging 

 the structure and redistributing the poi'fers of government as it 

 might see fit (subject only to the limitations imposed by the 

 United States Constitution), and promulgate the new Constitution 

 without any opportunity on the part of the people to express their 

 will in the matter, for there is no requirement that the work of 

 a convention be submitted to the people for approval before taking 

 effect. 



This is, to be sure, a rather extreme statement of the theory 



^Amendments of 1835 , Art, IV, Sec, 1, CI, 1, 



