ARGUMENT OF MR. ROOT 31 



I do not know of 'anything in the treaty which would justify 

 that statement unless it be the words "in common." I think the 

 words "in common" do justify it. It is an important part of the 

 treaty. There is the limitation upon the right granted, the limit 

 upon the right possessed by Great Britain, and that is of importance 

 in determining what the right is. So I think it is fair to infer that 

 that purpose may have led to the insertion of these words. 



So. much for the meaning of "in common," which is all I am 

 addressing myself to now, and not to the legal effect of the words 

 in combination with the other words of this article. The words 

 have an ordinary, natural, undisputed significance as negativing 

 exclusion and carrying into the right granted the limits of the rights 

 possessed by the grantor; the first, certainly, because that is the 

 use that the parties had been making of the phrase in writing and 

 speaking about the subject; and the second, possibly, perhaps 

 probably, because it was natural in view of the situation in which 

 the grantor nation was. 



I pass to the meaning of the word "inhabitants." Some point 

 has been made about that. I think it is used as an eqxxivalent for 

 "subjects" or "citizens," in a general way, as indicating the great 

 body of himian beings who make up the organized civil society 

 called the United States. There was a rational explanation for 

 the use of the term "inhabitants" instead of "subjects" or "citi- 

 zens." Of course it was taken into the treaty of 1818 from the 

 treaty of 1783 and the preliminary articles of 1782. In 1782 the 

 relations of the individuals to the organized civil society were quite 

 vague and unsettled. Men were very much accustomed to group 

 the members of the different divisions of an empire or kingdom 

 under the head of subjects. The person of the sovereign was the 

 nexus. In 1782 they were cutting off the head of this organized 

 society in which the King of Great Britain had united the people 

 living in these thirteen colonies, the people living in the British 

 Islands and the people living in the northern colonies in America, 

 and they had not quite settled how the relations between the 

 individuals should be described in lieu of describing them as sub- 

 jects of this King who was no longer uniting them. In the articles 

 of Confederation, which appear in the British Counter-Case Appen- 

 ^> P- 7) you will see that uncertainty: 



