Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/417

397 GOVERNMENT OF ISLAND TERRITORY. 397 Judicial proceedings were conducted in the forms of the civil law. A son, whose father was living, could not sue without his consent, nor persons belonging to a religious order, without that of their superior.^ He who reviled the Saviour or the Virgin Mary, had his tongue cut out and his property confiscated.^ A married woman convicted of adultery and her paramour were to be de- livered up to the will of the husband, with the reserve, however, that if he killed one he must kill both.' All travellers, previous to circulating any news of importance, were bound to relate it to the syndic of the district, who might for- bid it to go farther if he thought such prohibition would be for the pubhc good.* There was a religious establishment. Two canons and twenty- five curates received salaries from the public treasury."^ A considerable code of laws, of which those to which I have referred are not unfair examples, was thus left to be administered or superseded and replaced by others, for an uncertain period, at the will of one man, an agent of the executive power. The Federalists in Congress, while willing, if not anxious, that Louisiana should be governed as a colonial dependence, objected to the passage of this Act, on the ground that it set up a despotism incompatible with the Constitution. The answer of the leaders of the party in power was that Congress had an authority in the terri- tories which it had not in the States, and that the United States were acting in the rightful capacity of sovereigns, precisely as Spain and France had acted before them.® In the case decided by Chief Justice Marshall twenty-five years later, to which allusion has already been made, that of the Ameri- can Insurance Company against Canter, the counsel for the de- fendant, one of whom was Daniel Webster, claimed in argument that the Constitution and laws of the United States did not extend over Florida upon its cession by Spain. The usages of nations, they said, had never conceded to the inhabitants of either con- quered or ceded territory a right to participate in the privileges of the Constitution of the country to which their allegiance had been transferred. Congress might therefore govern them at its will.'
 * An Account of Louisiana, &c., App. xxviii.
 * Ihii., xlv. ' IhH., xlvi.
 * Ihid., Ixxi. » Ihid., 38.
 * Adams' Hist., ii, 119. ' i Peters, 533, 538.