The duty which the hand of Providence, rather than any purpose of man, has laid upon us, is within our constitutional powers.
Whitelaw Reid
The Public Record
Whitelaw Reid was an American politician, diplomat and newspaper editor, as well as the author of Ohio in the War, a popular work of history.
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The notion that the United States is an inferior sort of nation, constitutionally without power for such public duties as other nations habitually assume, may perhaps be dismissed with a single citation from the Supreme Court.
Is it consistent with that spirit to hold territory permanently, or for long periods of time, without admitting it to the Union?
To be more papist than the Pope will cease to be a thing exciting wonder if every day modern men, in the consideration of practical and pressing problems, are to be more narrowly constitutional than the men that wrote the Constitution!
Does anybody seriously think, then, that though we have held New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma as territory organized or unorganized, part of it nearly a century and all of it half a century, our representatives believed all the while they…
Who imagines that when the third of a century during which we have already held Alaska is rounded out to a full century, that unorganized Territory will even then have any greater prospect than at present of admission as a State? or who…
Is it not too plain for argument that the Constitution here refers to territory not a part of the United States, but subject to its jurisdiction--territory, for example, like the Sandwich Islands or the Philippines?
What, then, shall we say to the opinion of the great Chief Justice?--for, after all, his is not a name to be dealt with lightly.
I do not say that while we sit here to make laws for these territories, we are not bound by every one of those great principles which are intended as general securities for public liberty.
Their political rights are franchises which they hold as privileges, in the legislative discretion of the United States.
The United States, having rightfully acquired the Territories, and being the only Government which can impose laws upon them, has the entire dominion and sovereignty, national and municipal, Federal and State.
It will make an end forever of Spain in this hemisphere.