The principles thus indicated would appear to distinguish with marked certitude the vast difference between the State’s existence and its recognition. The latter was a political consequence of the former. At the Berlin Conference no question was raised concerning a fact so patent, nor did the signatories distinguish between the five Powers in possession of the Congo Basin in framing the clauses of the Berlin Act imposing the same obligations on all these Governments. Those obligations related only to their economic _régime_ in Central Africa. The articles of the Act concerning the Congo Basin, which applied to the Independent State of the Congo, were also binding upon Great Britain, France, Germany, and Portugal. This sign of equality is inconsistent with the notion that the Congo Free State is the vassal territory of the Powers signatory of the General Act of Berlin. It has been contended by technicians of the law of nations who are in the service of those who seek to disrupt the Congo Free State, that a State cannot accrue out of a private association, such, for instance, as the International African Association or the _Comité d’Études du Haut-Congo_. But just as events are constantly spoiling theories, so had the flag of the Belgians confounded that contention by demonstrating in a practical manner that a State _did_ exist, and that all the elements of a State government were present in the neighbourhood of Stanley Pool long before the Berlin Conference. The identity of a State consists in its having the same origin or commencement of existence; and its difference from all other States consists in its having a different origin or commencement of existence.... The habitual obedience of the members of any political society to a superior authority must have once existed in order to constitute a sovereign State.[1] American writers on the subject are of opinion that the North American Indian in his aboriginal state was not a political unit of the United States at the time when the Union declared its independence. In Johnson _v._ McIntosh, 8 Wheaton, p. 543, Chief-Justice Marshall described their status in the following language: The Indian inhabitants of the United States are to be considered merely as occupants, to be protected, indeed, while in peace, in the possession of their lands, but to be deemed incapable of transferring the absolute title to others independent of territorial sovereignty. To this may be added the apposite declaration of Mr. Fish, Secretary of State, to Mr. Hackett, June 12, 1873: Aboriginal inhabitants in a savage state have not such a title to the land where they dwell or roam as entitle them to confer it upon persons from another country. [Sidenote: A Strange Fallacy.]