The subject will be discussed in Chapter XXXV (The Constitutional Extent Of The Treaty-Making Power. 210. Treaty-Making Power Granted Without Express Limitations) of this treatise.

This theory has been declared by several publicists, and in a number of obiter dicta, of the Supreme Court. Thus Magoon in his Report to the War Department on the "Legal Status of the Territory and Inhabitants of the Islands Acquired by the United States During the War with Spain," says: "The United States derives the right to acquire territory from the fact that it is a nation; to speak more definitely, a sovereign nation. Such a nation has an inherent right to acquire territory, similar to the inherent right of a person to acquire property." So also Mr. Charles A. Gardner declares: "The nation needs no express grant of power for any international act. . . . The right to acquire territory irrespective of its situs, contiguous or foreign, by conquest, treaty, purchase or discovery, is an acknowledged and well established attribute of sovereignty and has been exercised by sovereigns from the beginning of recorded history. No one pretends that the right is specifically enumerated in the Constitution. Hence it remains an attribute of the sovereign people, and Congress and the President, the sole agents and trustees of that sovereignty, have exclusive and unrestricted power to exercise it. I advance the proposition with deference that this right is itself a primary and substantive attribute of sovereignty, as is the right of national existence or self-defence; and I shall regard it in this discussion as the primary and fundamental authority for territorial expansion." (Pamphlet entitled "Our Right to Acquire and Hold Foreign Territory." Published 1899.)

For an excellent argument for the support of the position here taken see also the prize essay of Mr. \V. H. Bikle, entitled "The Constitutional Power of Congress Over the Territory of the United States," and published as a supplement to the American Law Register for August, 1901. See also Butler, "The Treaty-Making Power of the United States." Butler declares his opinion to be: "'That the treaty-making power of the United States, as -ted in the Central Government, is derived not only from the powers expressly conferred by the Constitution, but that it is also possessed by that government as an attribute of sovereignty, and that it extends to every subject which can be made the basis of negotiation and contract between any of the sovereign powers of the world, or in regard to which the several States of the Union themselves could have negotiated and contracted if the Constitution had not expressly prohibited the States from exercising the treaty-making power in any matter whatever and vested that power exclusively in, and expressly delegated it to, the Federal Government."