ever two-thirds of both houses shall deem it
necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the
application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the several States,
shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case,
shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this
Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the
several States, or by conventions in three-fourths thereof, as the one
or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress;
provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one
thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first
and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that
no State, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage
in the Senate_.

[Footnote 61: For Amendment XI, see p. 160; for Amendment XII, see p.
119.]

Thus, amendments may be proposed in either of two ways: by a vote of
two-thirds of both houses of Congress; or by a National convention
called by Congress for that purpose on the application of two-thirds of
the State legislatures. The convention method has never been used in
proposing amendments to this Constitution.

Amendments may also be ratified in two ways: by the legislatures in
three-fourths of the several States; or by conventions in three-fourths
thereof. Congress has always selected the first of these methods.

Amending the Constitution Difficult.--That it is difficult to amend
the Constitution may be seen when we consider that some two thousand
amendments have been proposed in an official way. During a single
session of the Fifty-seventh Congress, fifty amendments, on twenty
different phases of government, were proposed in one or other of the
houses of Congress.

Amendment XIII.--The purpose of the first ten amendments has
already been noted on p. 112.

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were the results of
negro slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation granted freedom to all of
the slaves in the States then in rebellion. There were some States,
however, as Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, where slavery might still
exist legally. In order to be rid of this institution altogether,
Congress proposed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which is
as follows:--

_Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for
crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exi