ribe who may
occupy, and on what conditions the vacant lands within those
boundaries? Whence does it get its jurisdiction of navigable rivers,
lakes, bays, and the seaboard within its territorial limits, as
appertaining to its domain? Here are rights that it could not have
derived from individuals, for individuals never possessed them in the
so-called state of nature. The concocters of the theory evidently
overlooked these rights, or considered them of no importance. They
seem never to have contemplated the existence of territorial states, or
the division of mankind into nations fixed to the soil. They seem not
to have supposed the earth could be appropriated; and, indeed, many of
their followers pretend that it cannot be, and that the public lands of
a nation are open lands, and whoso chooses may occupy them, without
leave asked of the national authority or granted. The American people
retain more than one reminiscence of the nomadic and predatory habits
of their Teutonic or Scythian ancestors before they settled on the
banks of the Don or the Danube, on the Northern Ocean, in Scania, or
came in contact with the Graeco-Roman civilization.

Yet mankind are divided into nations, and all civilized nations are
fixed to the soil. The territory is defined, and is the domain of the
state, from which all private proprietors hold their title-deeds.
Individual proprietors hold under the state, and often hold more, than
they occupy; but it retains in all private estates the eminent domain,
and prohibits the alienation of land to one who is not a citizen. It
defends its domain, its public unoccupied lauds, and the lands owned by
private individuals, against all foreign powers. Now whence, if
government has only the rights ceded it by individuals, does it get
this domain, and hold the right to treat settlers on even its
unoccupied lands as trespassers? In the state of nature the
territorial rights of individuals, if any they have, are restricted to
the portion of land they occupy with their rude culture, and with their
flocks and herds, and in civilized nations to what they hold from the
state, and, therefore, the right as held and defended by all nations,
and without which the nation has no status, no fixed dwelling, and is
and can be no state, could never have been derived from individuals.
The earliest notices of Rome show the city in possession of the sacred
territory, to which the state and all political power are att