Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/126

1803. the same question in a new form, he glided with extreme delicacy over the thin ice of the Constitution. His answer to Tracy was an admission. He pointed out that the Federalist argument carried centralization further than it was carried by this treaty. "By his construction," said Breckenridge, "territories and citizens are considered and held as the property of the government of the United States, and may consequently be used as dangerous engines in the hands of the government against the States and people." This was true. The Federalists maintained that such territory could be held only as property, not as part of the Union; and the consequences of this doctrine, if granted, were immense. Breckenridge argued that the admission by treaty of a foreign State was less dangerous, and therefore more constitutional, than such ownership of foreign territory. The conclusion was not perfectly logical, and was the less so because he denied the power in neither case. "Could we not," he went on, quoting from Tracy’s speech, "incorporate in the Union some foreign nation containing ten millions of inhabitants,—Africa, for instance,—and thereby destroy our government? Certainly the thing would be possible if Congress would do it and the people consent to it. . . .  The true construction must depend on the manifest import of the instrument and the good sense of the community." What then had become of the old Republican principle that acts of undelegated authority were no acts at all? Or had the States really delegated to the President and