organize. Is it consistent with that spirit to hold territory
permanently, or for long periods of time, without admitting it to the
Union? Let the man who wrote the very clause in question answer. That
man was Gouverneur Morris of New York, and you will find his answer on
page 192 of the third volume of his writings, given only fifteen years
after, in reply to a direct question as to the exact meaning of the
clause: "I always thought, when we should acquire Canada and Louisiana,
it would be proper to govern them as provinces, and allow them no voice
in our councils. In wording the third section of the fourth article, I
went as far as circumstances would permit to establish the exclusion."
This framer of the Constitution desired then, and intended definitely
and permanently, to keep _Louisiana_ out! And yet there are men who
tell us the provision he drew would not even permit us to keep the
Philippines out! To be more papist than the Pope will cease to be a
thing exciting wonder if every day modern men, in the consideration of
practical and pressing problems, are to be more narrowly constitutional
than the men that wrote the Constitution!

Is it said that, at any rate, our practice under this clause of the
Constitution has been against the view of the man that wrote it, and in
favor of that quoted from Mr. Chief Justice Marshall? Does anybody
seriously think, then, that though we have held New Mexico, Arizona,
and Oklahoma as territory organized or unorganized, part of it nearly a
century and all of it half a century, our representatives believed all
the while they had no constitutional right to do so? Who imagines that
when the third of a century during which we have already held Alaska is
rounded out to a full century, that unorganized Territory will even
then have any greater prospect than at present of admission as a State?
or who believes our grandchildren will be violating the Constitution in
keeping it out? Who imagines that under the Constitution ordained on
this continent specifically "for the United States of _America_," we
will ever permit the Kanakas, Chinese, and Japanese, who make up a
majority of the population in the Sandwich Islands, to set up a
government of their own and claim admission as an independent and
sovereign State of our American Union? Finally, let me add that
conclusive proof relating not only to practice under the Constitution,
but to the precise construction of the constitutional language