ARGUMENT OF ELIHU ROOT. 1953 



Then the articles go on to put into the United- States of America 

 the entire treaty-making power, making the United States sovereign 

 internationally. But you will perceive that there rather the domi- 

 nant idea was that citizenship was citizenship of the several states, 

 and that the relation to the international organisation was that of 

 the inhabitants of the country who were citizens of the several states. 



Indeed, they had little to guide them. You go back to the Roman 

 State and citizenship ; the privilege of civis Romanus sum related but 

 to the little town on the banks of the Tiber rather than to the great 

 world-wide political organisation, and vast numbers of people the 

 great ma-jority of the people who really made up the political or- 

 ganisation of the Roman Empire had no privileges of citizenship. 

 Go farther back, to the Greeks, and there was no such thing as citi- 

 zenship of the Achaean League or the Delian Confederacy; and 

 people then were very much in the habit of thinking about what they 

 had done in Rome and Greece. They were trying to work out a 

 theory of government, of association, without a sovereign, and about 

 the best models they could get were those drawn from classical pre- 

 cedents. 



Now a type has emerged. When, in 1787, the people in the United 

 States came to make a new constitution, they found that this loosely 

 compacted organisation, in which municipal sovereignty was deemed 

 everything, was too weak, and that they must make a stronger central 

 sovereign, and from that came the type of national sovereignty, na- 

 tional citizenship. But they had not reached that point then, and 

 so they used a comprehensive word which went just as far as their 

 conception of organisation had gone, endeavouring to cover the same 

 idea which would have described the people of Austria and Hungary 

 as subjects of Francis Joseph, and which would have described the 

 people of Scotland, England and Wales, and Berwick-on-Tweed as 

 subjects of His Majesty King George. 



I will call your attention to the fact that when these negotiators 

 of 1824 met to make a formal protocol about the rights of the United 

 States under the treaty of 1818, the protocol I have just referred to, 

 they said, " The citizens of the United States were clearly entitled 

 under the convention of October 1818," &c. That was signed by 

 Mr. Rush, one of the negotiators of 1818. and Mr. Huskisson and Mr. 

 Stratford Canning, who were most skilful and fully informed ne- 

 gotiators, on the part of Great Britain, and it shows that they 

 regarded the terms as being convertible. 



THE PRESIDENT : Would it be possible to say, having reference to 

 article 4 of the Articles of Confederation, that in the sense of the 

 treaty of 1818, only the citizens of the thirteen States were to be con- 

 sidered as inhabitants of the United States? Then the concept of 



