h was decided by
the Supreme Court in 1795, certain counsel thought it pertinent to urge
the following conception of the War Power:

A formal compact is not essential to the institution of a
government. Every nation that governs itself, under what form
soever, without any dependence on a foreign power, is a
sovereign state. In every society there must be a sovereignty.
1 Dall. Rep. 46, 57. Vatt. B. 1. ch. 1. sec. 4. The powers of
war form an inherent characteristic of national sovereignty;
and, it is not denied, that Congress possessed those
powers....[23]

To be sure, only two of the Justices felt it necessary to comment on
this argument, which one of them endorsed, while the other rejected it.

Yet seventy-five years later Justice Bradley incorporated closely
kindred doctrine into his concurring opinion in the Legal Tender
Cases;[24] and in the years following the Court itself frequently
brought the same general outlook to questions affecting the National
Government's powers in the field of foreign relations. Thus in the
Chinese Exclusion Case, decided in 1889, Justice Field, in asserting the
unlimited power of the National Government, and hence of Congress, to
exclude aliens from American shores, remarked:

While under our Constitution and form of government the great
mass of local matters is controlled by local authorities, the
United States, in their relation to foreign countries and
their subjects or citizens, are one nation, invested with the
powers which belong to independent nations, the exercise of
which can be invoked for the maintenance of its absolute
independence and security throughout its entire territory.[25]

And four years later the power of the National Government to deport
alien residents at the option of Congress was based by Justice Gray on
the same general reasoning.[26]

Finally, in 1936, Justice Sutherland, speaking for the Court in United
States _v._ Curtiss-Wright Corporation, with World War I a still recent
memory, took over bodily counsel's argument of 140 years earlier, and
elevated it to the head of the column of authoritative constitutional
doctrine. He said:

A political society cannot endure without a supreme will
somewhere. Sovereignty is never held in suspense. When,
therefore, the external sovereignty of Great Britain in
respect of the colonies ceased, it immediately passed to the