Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/491

OUR NEW POSSESSIONS. 4/1 sovereign power, like those referred to by the Chief Justice, has been conferred, in however few words, all of it was given, unless some qualification was to be found in the Constitution itself; and that the general limitations of the Constitution related rather to the number of the powers than to the reach of them. They are intrusted to the general government, to be used as absolutely as the States themselves could have used them ; in handling those general interests which they confided to the nation. The power of acquiring colonies is an incident to the function of representing the whole country in dealing with other nations and states, whether in peace or war. The power of holding and governing them follows, necessarily, from that of gaining them. Upon the power of acquiring colonies the Constitution has no restraint upon the sound judgment of the political department of the United States. Now let us observe an important point: when a new region is acquired it does not at once and necessarily become a part of what we call the "territory" of the United States. Or, to speak more exactly, the people in such regions do not necessarily hold the same relation to the nation which the occupants of the territories hold. It is for the political department of the government, that is, Congress or the treaty-making power, to determine what the politi- cal relation of the new people shall be. Neither they nor their children born within the newly acquired region, necessarily become citizens of the United States. Take, for illustration, the case of our tribal Indians. Always many of them have lived within the territories of the United States. Our government has mainly fol- lowed the example of our English ancestors of recognizing them as tribes rather than individuals. Congress and the treaty-making power have dealt with them as a separate people, who have their own rules, customs and laws, although living on our land. While regulating " commerce with the Indian tribes," to use the phrase of the Constitution, and so laying down rules for governing the intercourse between Indians and others, and punishing crimes committed by tribal Indians on whites, or vice versa. Congress has never yet, by any wholesale provision, undertaken to bring them fully under subjection to us. That Congress might do this at any time, is settled. It has done it partly and by steps and degrees, as much as it pleased, all along. It has ended the business of making treaties with them, and has begun to punish crimes com- mitted by one tribal Indian on another in the Indians' own country.