States in permanent relationship with Great Britain, gives many signs,
to the student, of the direction in which political thought is
traveling in its progress toward a correct and final theory; but at
the present time there seems to be no prospect of the emergence of a
final theory in that country. Here in America, political thinking,
following the line of least resistance, has, as a general rule,
concentrated itself upon the Constitution of the United States, as if
in that instrument an answer was to be found for every political
problem with which the Union may be confronted. To some of us,
however, it has appeared inconsistent with the principles of the
American Revolution that the Constitution of the United States should
be the Constitution of any communities except the thirteen States
forming the original Union and those which they have admitted into
their Union; and, while yielding to none in our belief in the
supremacy of the Constitution throughout the Union, we have sought to
base the relationship between the Union itself and its Territories and
annexed insular, transmarine and transterranean regions, upon such
principles as would enable the American Union to justify itself in the
eyes of all civilized nations, and as would be consistent with the
ideas for which it stood at the Revolution. Those of us who thus limit
the effect of the Constitution to the Union are charged with
advocating an absolute power of the Union over its annexed regions. It
is assumed that there is no intermediate theory between that which
assumes the Constitution of the American Union to extend to these
regions in some more or less partial and metaphorical way,--for it is
evident upon inspection that it cannot extend in any literal way,--and
that which assumes that the Union is the Government of all these
regions with absolute power.

It is a somewhat curious illustration of the truth that history