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476 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. These regions now belonged to the nation. They were not •States, but they had been accepted tty the national government under a guaranty that eventually they might become States. It was not necessary to make such a guaranty ; the Constitution did not require it; it was purely an arrangement of policy. Then, in 1803, came that enormous accession, by purchase from France for ^15,000,000, of a tract reaching (as we afterwards insisted in the Oregon controversy) from the mouth of the Mississippi to the Pacific at Vancouver, a region vastly larger than the original country east of the Mississippi.^ These great regions, all together, composed what Marshall called in 1820 the "American Empire." The new tract included what now makes up fifteen States and two territories; namely, the States of Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, the two Dakotas, Nebraska, a part of Minnesota, Colorado, and Kansas, the States of Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, the territory of Oklahoma and the Indian Territory. At the end of the next decade, in 1819, this example of purchas- ing territory was followed by gaining from Spain the territory of Florida, at an outlay of $5,000,000. Then, in 1845, came a joint resolution of Congress, not a treaty, by which the republic of Texas was added directly to the Union, as Vermont and Kentucky had been in 1791 and 1792, without ever passing through the pupilage of a separate dependency of the nation. Then followed war with Mexico, on a question of the true boundary of Texas ; and as our neighbor, Mr. John Fiske, tells us, in his valuable history of the United States, " When peace was made with Mexico in February, 1848, it added to the United States an enormous territory, equal in area to Germany, France, and Spain added together." This was supplemented by a pur- chase from Mexico in 1853. The whole region is now occupied by five States and two territories, namely, by the States of California, Nevada and Utah, a part of the States of Colorado and Kansas, and the territories of Arizona and New Mexico. Then in 1867 came the purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7,000,000. This was a novel accession ; for it was no longer con- tiguous territory that was bought in, but a region separated from us by a breadth of foreign country covering several degrees of latitude. Alaska stretches towards the north for more than fifteen degrees, and away up into the Arctic Ocean. It reaches westward until its 1 It is well known that our claim went farther, — both as regards the grounds of it, and the region it covered.