Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/494

474 474 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. as we do over ours. I observe in a recent magazine (" Harper's Monthly," for January, 1899) a valuable and accurate statement on this subject by Professor Hart, our learned and indefatigable professor of history at Harvard. He remarks truly that the United States, for more than a century, " has been a great colonial power without suspecting it;" and he points out that the conception of a colony is that of a " tract of territory subordinate to the inhabi- tants of a different tract of country, and ruled by authorities wholly or in part responsible to the main administration, instead of to the people of their own region." Great distance, he re- marks, is not necessarily involved, nor physical separation from the home country, nor the exercise of arbitrary control, nor the presence of an alien and inferior race. " The important thing about colonies is the co-existence of two kinds of government, with an ultimate control in one geographical region, and dependence in the other; and since 1784 there has never been a year when in the United States there has not been, side by side, such a ruling nation and such subject colonies; only we choose to call them ' territories.' " When people permit themselves to talk, then, of " vassal states and subject peoples," as if the necessary condition of colonies, say of Canada or Australia, or our territories, were one of slavery ; when they talk of the holding of colonies as contrary to the spirit of our free institutions, of its being un-American, and having a tendency to degrade our national character; when they quote and pervert the large utterances of the Declaration of Inde- pendence, and remind us, as if it were pertinent to any questions now up, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, — let them be reminded of our own national experi- ence. Has it been " un-American " to govern the territories and the District of Columbia as we have ? Has it been contrary to the fundamental principles of free government or the Declaration of Independence ? Has it tended to the degradation of our national character ? Has England suffered in her national character by governing Canada and Australia as she does ? Or have England and the United States done sensibly and well in so doing ? Eng- land had learned, and taught, the lesson of where the just powers of government come from, as long ago, to say the least, as 1688, when she gave the death blow to the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Ninety years later we had to remind her of that great doc- trine, when she was making us suffer from a stupid and oppressive