the ruling territory, and could not be divested of
its sacred and governing character. The portions of the territory of
the United States once erected into States and consecrated as ruling
territory can never be deprived, except by foreign conquest or
successful revolution, of its sacred character and inviolable rights.

The State is territorial, not personal, and is constituted by public,
not by private wealth, and is always respublica or commonwealth, in
distinction from despotism or monarchy in its oriental sense, which is
founded on private wealth, or which assumes that the authority to
govern, or sovereignty, is the private estate of the sovereign. All
power is a domain, but there is no domain without a dominus or lord.
In oriental monarchies the dominus is the monarch; in republics it is
the public or people fixed to the soil or territory, that is, the
people in their territorial, and not in their personal or genealogical
relation. The people of The United States are sovereign only within
the territory or domain of the United States, and their sovereignty is
a state, because fixed, attached, or limited to that specific
territory. It is fixed to the soil, not nomadic. In barbaric nations
power is nomadic and personal, or genealogical, confined to no
locality, but attaches to the chief, and follows wherever he goes. The
Gothic chiefs hold their power by a personal title, and have the same
authority in their tribes on the Po or the Rhone as on the banks of the
Elbe or the Danube. Power migrates with the chief and his people, and
may be exercised wherever he and they find themselves, as a Swedish
queen held when she ordered the execution of one of her subjects at
Paris, without asking permission of the territorial lord. In these
nations, power is a personal right, or a private estate, not a state
which exists only as attached to the domain, and, as attached to the
domain, exists independently of the chief or the government. The
distinction is between public domain and private domain.

The American system is republican, and, contrary to what some
democratic politicians assert, the American democracy is territorial,
not personal; not territorial because the majority of the people are
agriculturists or landholders, but because all political rights,
powers, or franchises are territorial. The sovereign people of the
United States are sovereign only within the territory of the United
States. The great body of th