e freemen have the elective franchise, but
no one has it save in his State, his county, his town, his ward, his
precinct. Out of the election district in which he is domiciled, a
citizen of the United States has no more right to vote than has the
citizen or subject of a foreign state. This explains what is meant by
the attachment of power to the territory, and the dependence of the
state on the domain. The state, in republican states, exists only as
inseparably united with the public domain; under feudalism, power was
joined to territory or domain, but the domain was held as a private,
not as a public domain. All sovereignty rests on domain or
proprietorship, and is dominion. The proprietor is the dominus or lord,
and in republican states the lord is society, or the public, and the
domain is held for the common or public good of all. All political
rights are held from society, or the dominus, and therefore it is the
elective franchise is held from society, and is a civil right, as
distinguished from a natural, or even a purely personal right.

As there is no domain without a lord or dominus, territory alone cannot
possess any political rights or franchises, for it is not a domain. In
the American system, the dominus or lord is not the particular State,
but the United States, and, the domain of the whole territory, whether
erected into particular States or not, is in the United States alone.
The United States do not part with the dominion of that portion of the
national domain included within a particular State. The State holds
the domain not separately but jointly, as inseparably one of the United
States: separated, it has no dominion, is no State, and is no longer a
joint sovereign at all, and the territory that it included falls into
the condition of any other territory held by the United States not
erected into one of the United States.

Lawyers, indeed, tell us that the eminent domain is in the particular
State, and that all escheats are to the State, not to the United
States. All escheats of private estates, but no public or general
escheats. But this has nothing to do with the public domain. The
United States are the dominus, but they have, by the constitution,
divided the powers of government between a General government and
particular State governments, and ordained that all matters of a
general nature, common to all the States, should be placed under the
supreme control of the former, and all matters