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strument was carefully studied; and especially those in which legislative power was bestowed. They would not have conferred upon Congress so extraordinary, so exceptional, so unprecedented an authority as that to determine the social order, and fix the domestic relations of the people of the United States, or any portion of the same, and to sanction its enactments by fines and imprisonments, in terms in which there was a shadow of equivocality. Admitting the possibility of the vestment, by a Constitution, of such power in a legislative body, nothing but words admitting of no other interpretation, and circumstances of the most portentous description would justify its exercise. When the framers of the Constitution wrote: "The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States," they did not mean "The Congress shall have power to prescribe the social order of the people of the Territories, and regulate their domestic relations, and to enforce the same by appropriate penalties." They knew, if the statesmen of the present day do not, that no authority placed in the hands of a body liable to be inflamed by popular bigotries, and swayed by transient fanaticisms could be more perilous, or more apt to be hastily and unjustly exercised, than the authority to dig beneath the civil state and tamper with the social basis upon which it is founded; and they intended to confer no such authority.
There is no ground for the assumption, that the statesmen of the centennial are any more sagacious or far-seeing than the statesmen of the revolutionary period. There is no warrant for the conceit that, in the presence of real or imaginary, civil, social or domestic exigencies, the Constitution may be expanded to mean, whatever, for the time being, a legislative majority think it would have meant if they had been entrusted with the making of it. There is no basis for the presumption that the inhabitants of the Territories are less competent to comprehend, or to make provision for their own civil, social or domestic needs, tastes or requirements, than the inhabitants of the States, or that Congress is any wiser in respect to the one than in respect to the other.
There was a time when, under the pressure of a ferocious fanaticism, it became fashionable to characterize the people of the Territories by the opprobrious title of "squatters," to regard them in the light of unlicensed intruders into the public domain—not
