Hamilton, commenting on the Constitution, declares that “the national and State systems are to be regarded as one whole.”[24] And finally, although our supreme law does not contain the word “sovereign,” or “sovereignty,” it implies sovereignty. The crowning illustration of this principle of implied sovereignty grew out of the acquisition of Louisiana in 1803. President Jefferson could find no provision of the Constitution specifically empowering the United States to make the acquisition, or to incorporate the region into the United States. He therefore proposed amending the Constitution so as to authorize the purchase. The President’s doubts of the power of the United States to acquire Louisiana were weaker than his doubt of power to incorporate the province into the United States,—that is, to make a foreign province or provinces inhabited, by an alien people, partakers in an American Commonwealth. He consulted his Cabinet. Levi Lincoln, the Attorney-General, was of opinion that to share the privileges and immunities of the people of the United States with a foreign population required the consent of the people of the United States, and he suggested that if a treaty of cession were made, containing such agreements, it should be put in the form of a change of boundaries instead of a cession, so as to bring the territory within the United States. Albert Gallatin, Secretary of Treasury, replied that to him it appeared: (1) That the United States as a nation have an inherent right to acquire territory; (2) That whenever that acquisition is by treaty, the same constituted authorities in which the treaty-making power is vested have a constitutional right to sanction the acquisition; and (3) That whenever the territory has become acquired, Congress have the power either of admitting it into the Union as a new State, or of annexing it to a State, with the consent of that State, or of making regulations for the government of such territory.[25] Thus, according to Gallatin, the United States, by its very nature, has the undoubted right to acquire, to hold, and to govern territory as a possession.[26] Twenty-five years after the purchase of Louisiana, Chief Justice Marshall handed down the decision of the Supreme Court, that “the Constitution confers absolutely on the government of the Union the powers of making war and of making treaties; consequently that government possesses the power of acquiring territory, either by conquest or treaty.”[27] In this decision, Marshall reasons as did Gallatin that a nation is by its very nature, sovereign, and possesses the powers and functions of sovereignty. When the American nation, a sovereign, created a government of delegated powers, under the Constitution, it delegated to that government powers adequate to its purposes as a nation.[28] The essential purpose of sovereignty is to continue sovereign. The word “sovereign” though not occurring in the Constitution is necessarily implied as a permanent quality or