Excerpt from Acquisition of Territory: Danger of Taking the Philippines, Their Retention Bodes Nothing but Evil It is not necessary, in order to uphold the right and power of this Government to acquire territory to hold territory. And govern its inhabitants to maintain that it is an absolute monarchy or an imperial despotism. The right to acquire and hold property is an. Ordinary one. It belongs to every private individual. It is incident to the existence of every corporation, whether public or private, with the implied limitation that it must be to subserve the objects and purposes of the corporation. This nation pos sesses that power. No one disputes it. But it is a power not ex isting independent of and apart from the Constitution, but is derivative from the express authority which that instrument con fers upon the Federal Government. This being an implied power, there are, of course no express limitations upon it, but there is always the implied one that the territory acquired must be to subserve some of the great objects and ends for which the Government itself was created. If we should concede for the purposes of the argument that the power to acquire and to hold territory was unlimited, it would by no means follow as an implication from that, or as a correlative proposition, that this nation would have absolute and uncontrolled power over the inhabitants which would thereby become subject to our jurisdiction. The arm of this nation, so potent for purposes of aggression or defense against a foreign foe, becomes impotent the moment it is turned to the oppression of any of our people, whether living in a State or in a Territory. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.