Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/123

106 sixty years to come, had declared "deep regret that a spirit has in sundry instances been manifested by the federal government to enlarge its powers by forced constructions of the constitutional charter which defines them; and that indications have appeared of a design to expound certain general phrases . . . so as to consolidate the States by degrees into one sovereignty." In purchasing Louisiana, the United States government had done an act identical with the despotic acts of consolidated European governments,—it had brought a foreign people without their consent and without consulting the States, and had pledged itself to incorporate this people in the Union. Colonel Taylor’s argument, so far as it went, supported the act; and although it evaded, or tried to evade, the most difficult points of objection, it went as far as the farthest in the path of forced construction. On the right to acquire territory, Taylor took the ground taken by Joseph Nicholson in the House,—he inferred it from the war and treaty powers: "If the means of acquiring and the right of holding are equivalent to the right of acquiring territory, then this right merged from the separate States to the United States, as indispensably annexed to the treaty-making power and the power of making war." This part of the Federalist scheme he adopted without a murmur; but when he came to the next inevitable step, he showed the want of courage often felt by honest men trying to be untrue to themselves. This territory which the Washington government