It was not till within the last few years that the right of Congress over the Territories was questioned. Certain classes of politicians then discovered that the whole of our past statesmanship had been a mistake, and that the time had come to propound a new doctrine. No! they said, it is not Congress, not the Federal Government, which is entitled to govern the Territories, but the Territories themselves,--which means the handful of their original occupants. The real sovereignty resides in the squatters, and Squatter Sovereignty is the charm which dispels all difficulties. Alas! it was rather like the ingredients mingled by Macbeth's hags, only "a charm of powerful trouble." Overlooking the fact that the Territories were Territories precisely because they were not States, this absurd theory proposed to confer the highest character of an organized political existence upon a society wholly inchoate. As _land_, the Territories were the property of the United States, to be disposed of and regulated by the will of Congress; as _collections of men_, they were yet immature communities, having in reality no social being, and in that light also wisely and benevolently subjected to the will of Congress; but Squatter Sovereignty elevated them, _willy nilly_, to an independent self-subsistence. They were declared full-formed and fledged before they were out of the shell. A mere conglomeration of emigrants, Indian traders, and half-breeds was invested with all the functions of a mature and ripened civilization. Long ere there were people enough in any Territory to furnish the officers of a regular government,--before they possessed any of the apparatus of court-houses, jails, legislative chambers, etc., essential to a regular government,--before they lived near enough to each other, in fact, to constitute a respectable town-meeting,--before they could pay the expenses or gather the means of their own defence from the Indians, these wonderful entities were held to be endowed with the right of entering into the most complicated relations and of forming the most important institutions for themselves,--and not only for themselves, but for their posterity. This puerile dogma was asserted ostensibly in the interest of Slavery, in order to get rid of the power of Congress over that subject; but the real source of it was the cowardice of those invertebrate and timorous politicians who desired to evade the responsibility of expressing opinions concerning this power. General Cass was the putative father of it, and it might well have come from one of his pliancy and calibre; but as Slavery itself, embodied in the person of Calhoun, scouted the feeble bantling, there was soon no one so mean as to confess the paternity. Abandoned of its begetters, Squatter Sovereignty wandered the streets like a squalid and orphaned outcast, begging anybody and everybody to take it in, and finding no creditable welcome anywhere.