When we say that the Constitution of its own force, applies to the Territories, we refer to the parts that are applicable to the Territories as distinguishable from the parts that relate to States exclusively. It is a provision of the Constitution that "No State shall make any law impairing the obligation of contracts." In terms this limitation does not extend to Territories. Congress might extend the limitation, but the Act of limitation would have only the force of law. 3. "The Constitution by the force of its own provisions is limited to the _people_ and States of the American Union." This is only a declaration that the Constitution does not apply to other states and communities. The word _people_ includes the inhabitants of the Territories as well as the inhabitants of the States. If there could have been a doubt in 1859 of the validity of this interpretation, the doubt has been removed by the Fourteenth Amendment. The inhabitants of Territories are thereby made citizens of the United States, are brought within the jurisdiction of the Constitution, and as citizens they are put upon an equality with the citizens of the States. They are of the _people_ of the American Union, and as such they are under the Constitution of the United States. These are the opening words of the amendment:-- "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." We have no subject classes in America excepting only such as have been created, temporarily, as I trust, in Porto Rico and the Philippine Islands, by the policy of President McKinley, and all in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which reads thus: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." President McKinley claimed jurisdiction over the Philippine Islands and consequently the inhabitants are entitled to the benign protection of this provision of the Constitution. There cannot be any form of involuntary servitude imposed upon any American citizen without a violation of this fundamental law. Hence it is that the administration is forced to deny citizenship to the inhabitants of the Island and to assert the claim that the President and Congress may govern the inhabitants of territories acquired by purchase, as in the case of the Philippine Islands, or by conquest, as in the case of Porto Rico, as they might be governed if the Constitution did not exist. And this, we are told by the President and his supporters, is not imperialism, but a process of extending the blessings of liberty and civilization to the inferior races of the earth.