Now if our laws had been imposed upon this people as a conquered nation, or if they had annexed themselves and their country to our rule and empire by anything like a treaty, all these proceedings would be right and proper. But as it is, we are two nations occupying the same land, and we have no more right to try them by our laws for offences committed 'inter se', than they have to seize and spear an Englishman, according to their law, because he has laid himself open to an action of 'crim. con.' at the suit of his next-door neighbour. Look at the question in another point of view. Is jurisdiction a necessary incident of sovereignty? Do a people become subject to our laws by the very act of planting the British standard on the top of a hill? If so, they have been subject to them from the days of Captain Cook; and the despatches of Her Majesty's Secretaries of State, declaring that the natives should be considered amenable to our laws for all offences which they might commit among themselves, were very useless compositions. We claim the sovereignty, yet we disclaim having obtained it by conquest; we acknowledge that it was not by treaty; we should be very sorry to allow that it was by fraud; and how, in the name of wonder, then, can we defend our claim? Secretaries of State have discovered the means, and tell us that Her Majesty's claim to possession and sovereignty is "based on a right of occupancy." Jurisdiction, however, is not the necessary incident of territorial sovereignty, unless that sovereignty were acquired by conquest or treaty. We question, indeed, whether it is the necessary consequence even of conquest -- the laws of the conqueror must first be expressly imposed. The old Saxon laws prevailed among the people of England after the Conquest, until the Norman forms were expressly introduced. It is well known in colonies, that the laws propounded in certain despatches are more powerful, and more regarded and reverenced, than any others, human or divine. A kind of moral gun-cotton, they drive through the most stupendous difficulties, and rend rocks that appeared to be insuperable barriers in the eyes of common sense or common justice. Judges are compelled to yield to their authority, and do violence to their own consciences whilst they help to lay the healing unction to those of their lawgivers.