58 



by legislative ennctnients. Tlioir protoption, -wlien it is accorded, 

 must be b}^ law, because it trendies upon tbe natural rights of the 

 people to capture and appropriate theiri. The State assumes a right 

 of public appropriation, and deprives its subjects of the right to 

 appropriate such animals and regulates or prohibits its exercise. If 

 the State takes the further step of declaring- by law that it has 

 appropriated these wild animals to the uses of Government and that 

 its possession and ownership aiie complete by legal construction and 

 without taking actual possession of them, they become the prop- 

 erty of the State wherever those laws are in force. Thus all 

 game laws are based on the sovereign right to appropriate wild 

 animals by the state. This right of government, lor it is such a 

 right, is illustrated in a forcible way by laws giving bounties for the 

 destruction of Avolves and other predatory animals. If a man, for 

 reasons of his own, shcmld claim that he was, rationc soli, the owner of 

 a cave that sheltered Avolves and tlierefore of the wolves, he could not 

 resist the rigiit of the state to cause their destruction in accordance 

 with law, even in the cave where they were bred but left uncon- 

 fined to go fortJi at will and maraud ui)on the property of others. 



The power of the state in such case is not based on its judicial 

 function of suppressing nuisance, but on its ownership, when it chooses 

 to assert it, over wild animals. 



It may be and, in a general sense, it is true that the private owner 

 of the soil on which a wild animal is bred can only acquire actual 

 property in such animal by its capture, but that is far from being true 

 as to the sovereign power in a state. A state that can not dispose of 

 what is res nuUins, within its own jurisdiction, is wanting in an essen- 

 tial power of sovereignty. It could not otherwise dispose of escheats, 

 waifs, derelicts, or forfeitures that occur without judicial procedure, as 

 many do occur. If these propositions are true it is unquestionable 

 that a state may acquire property in anything susceptible of ownership 

 that is res nullius, found within its jurisdiction, by a simple declaration 

 of law and without taking it into actual possession. The property so 

 acquired is the creature of municipal law. 



The United States has done all that is necessary to establish its 

 ownership of fur-seals by municipal laws that are operative against 

 everybody within the limits of their jurisdiction, whether those limits 

 include all the waters of Bering Sea or oidy the land and waters with- 

 in the ordinary 3-mile liuiit. Within those limits this declaration of 



