By the third article, it is agreed that the inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated into the Union of the United States as soon as possible, according to the principles of the federal constitution, and be admitted to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages, and immunities of the citizens of the United States; and in the mean time they shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and the religion which they profess. On expounding this article, my colleague has declared that the President and Senate have no power to acquire new territory by treaty, and he argues that our people are to be for ever confined to their present limits. This is an assertion directly contrary to the powers inherent in independent nations, and contradictory to the frequent and allowed exercise of that power in our own nation. We are constantly in the practice of receiving territory by cession from the red men of the West, the aborigines of our country. The very treaty mentioned in the President’s Message, with the Kaskaskias Indians, whereby we have acquired a large extent of land, would, according to this doctrine, be unconstitutional; and so would all the treaties which add to the size of our statute book, with the numerous tribes of the natives on our frontiers. According to this construction, all our negotiations so happily concluded with those people, whom we ever have uniformly acknowledged as the sovereigns of the soil, are nugatory, and to be holden for naught. He said, he was perfectly aware of the answer which would be made, that we held all our national domain, under Great Britain, by virtue of the treaty concluded at Paris in 1783. What, after all, was the amount of that cession by England? Certainly not a conveyance of a country which never was theirs, but rightfully belonged to the Indian natives; for it was, in its true construction, merely a _quit claim_ of the pretensions or title of the land which the English had obtained by conquest and treaty from the French. By that negotiation, the United States obtained a bare relinquishment of the claims and possessions of those two powerful nations. But the paramount title of the original inhabitants was not affected by this. However contemptuously the rights of these rude and feeble tribes had been regarded by the Europeans, their descendants in these States had considered them with recognition and respect. Until the Indians sold their lands for an equivalent, the humane and just principles of the American Government acknowledged them to be the only legitimate owners. And the sovereignty acquired by treaty or purchase to our Government was derived from the title which the natives transferred to them as grantees in a fair bargain and sale. Such, Mr. M. argued, were the rules of true construction, and these rules admitted and acted upon by the Federal Government; and yet, according to the novel doctrine of this day, every treaty with the natives for