Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/389

THE STATUS OF OUR NEW TERRITORIES. 369 Who, then, are those persons of whom the United States as a body politic consists, and who constitute its members? Clearly they must be either the States in their corporate capacity, i. e., artificial and legal persons, or the citizens of all the States in the aggregate; and it is not difficult to see that they are the former. Indeed, the latter do not form a political unit for any purpose. The citizens of each State form the body politic of that State, and die States form the body politic of the United States. The latter, therefore, consisted at first of the original thirteen States, just as the Confederation did; but, as often as a new State was admitted, a new member was received into the body politic, — which, there- fore, now consists of forty-five members. It will be seen, there- fore, that, while the United States, in its second sense, signifies the body politic created by the Constitution, in its first sense it signi- fies the members of that body poHtic in the aggregate. A conse- quence is that, while in its first sense the term "United States" is always plifral, in its second sense it is in strictness always singular. The State of New York furnishes a good illustration of the two senses in which the term "United States" is used under the Constitution; for the style of that State, as a body politic, is "The People of the State of New York," and the members of that body politic are the citizens of the State. The term "people," therefore, in that State, means, first, all the citizens of the State in the aggre- gate {i. e., the members of the body politic), and, secondly, the body politic itself; and while in the former sense it is plural, in the latter sense it is singular. The term "United States" is used in its second sense whenever it is used for the purpose of expressing legal or political relations between the United States and the particular States, or between the former and foreign sovereigns or states, or legal relations between the former and private persons, while it is used in its first and original sense whenever it is desired to designate the particular States collectively, either as such or as members of the body politic of the United States. It is also used in that sense when- ever it is used to designate the territory of all the States in the aggregate. As a substitute for the term "United States," when used in its second sense, the term "Union" is often employed. The original difference between "United States" and "Union" was that, while the former was concrete, the latter was abstract; and hence it is