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                             2030
Mr. President, I do not know that those officials would be reappointed: but I 
take it that the purpose of the bill as originally drafted was that they should not 
hold office beyond that period.
Mr. MORGAN. Except the judges. The Senator will notice that the section 
does not apply to the judges. It reads:
Except the chief justice and associate justices of the supreme court and the 
judges of the circuit courts, who shall continue in office until their respective 
offices become vacant.
Mr. TELLER.   Are they all life terms?
Mr. MORGAN. No; they are not. The terms of the judges of the supreme 
court are for life, but not the judges of the circuit courts.
Mr. TELLER.   Only the judges of the supreme court?
Mr. MORGAN.   That is all.
Mr. TELLER.   I did not notice the last part of the section.
Mr. MORGAN. I hope I have now placed the question clearly before the 
Senate. The first proposition that the Senator from Connecticut is demanding 
by his amendment is that the power of appointment shall be taken away from the 
governor and given over to the President of the United States. The second 
proposition is that the term shall be limited to four years, instead of nine years, 
as the Senate voted when we adopted that amendment here the other day.
Mr. PLATT of Connecticut.   It has not been adopted.
Mr. MORGAN. The third proposition, resulting naturally or necessarily 
from the Senator's amendment, is that these men shall go out of office at once 
on the passage of this bill, because the appointing power is changed from the 
governor to the President. Those are the three propositions, which are clear 
enough, I think, for almost anybody to understand.
It has been stated here, Mr. President, that we never before had a Territorial 
judge appointed by anybody but the President of the United States. We never 
have had. It is not in the interest of local self-government that the people of a 
Territory should have the right to elect their judges or to have them appointed 
by the local authorities.
Mr. PLATT of Connecticut.   Mr. President--
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Does the Senator from Alabama yield to the 
Senator from Connecticut?
Mr. MORGAN.    I do.
Mr. PLATT of Connecticut. But the bill provides that the President shall 
appoint the governor. Then it provides that the governor shall appoint the 
judges.
Mr. MORGAN.   Very good.
Mr. PLATT of Connecticut. Certainly, it seems to me, the President is as 
well qualified to appoint the judges as is the governor whom the President may 
appoint.
Mr. BEVERIDGE.   It is even more important.
Mr. MORGAN. Not by any means in the world is the President as well 
qualified. The governor of the Hawaiian Islands knows every man who is 
there. The President does not know anybody. He depends upon the 
politicians who surround him and upon interested parties for his information. 
He has to do that very disagreeable thing, which he does every day of his life, 
guess at the best man upon the best information he can get, whereas the 
governor, being a local officer, knows exactly whom ho is appointing, and if he 
makes a misappointment he is responsible to the President, who has the power 
of removing him at any time. The theory of this thing was that the responsibility 
of the governor to the President, both of them being executive officers, was 
direct and immediate, and that that was the right way to get control of the 
judiciary and all other establishments through him.
But, it is said, we have never had appointments made in that way.
Well, Mr. President, if we never hereafter have anything we have not had 
heretofore, we had better stop and sit down and quit trying to grow or to 
progress. A great many things have come, along, some by accident and some 
by design, that have helped us out of very serious and depraving difficulties in the 
past- many-and I am in favor of that kind of progress, whether you call it 
"expansion" or whatever you may call it. I am in favor of lifting this 
Government, every step we take, upon a higher plane than we occupied before.
Now, let us see. The people of a Territory, according to the representative 
idea which pervades this Republic and lies at the bottom of it in every one of 
its features, would have a right to elect their judges. Suppose this bill hail 
provided that the judges of the Territory, of the circuit courts of the Territory, 
and the district judges should be elected by the people; could anybody have 
objected? Then the question would be whether the people or the governor or 
the President was most likely to get a good judge.
There are a great many persons in the United States who are not yet reconciled 
to the idea of electing judges by the people; there are many of the States that will 
not yet submit to even that; yet it is


a strong representative, democratic idea. We could easily enough have put that 
feature into this bill, and this Senate would have passed it with a shout, from 
what I understand to be the sentiment expressed here; and by the time we had 
got through with it and had got the judges elected there we probably would have 
had a lot of vagabonds upon that bench who would ruin the islands. We could 
not pass over the necessities of the situation and frame theories of government to 
apply to a people who were themselves incongruous, without training, and 
without the knowledge of civil government-we could not do it; it was not 
required of us. But it is not the first time by any means that we have ever done 
this in the United States.
Here are some treaties with the Five Civilized Tribes, two of which I knew 
very well when I was a boy, and spoke the language of one of them-the Creek 
Indians. They were a high race of men compared with other Indians, and they 
went off-the Seminoles, the Creeks, the Chickasaws, the Choctaws, and the 
Cherokees-to the West. By a treaty we gave them authority to organize a civil 
government, of course under our protection, but not under the reserved power 
to repeal their laws. No man ever heard of a bill brought into the Congress of 
the United States to repeal a law which was enacted by the legislatures of either 
of those five tribes, and he never will hear of it.
What did they do under that authority, which is supported also by statutes in 
the-same language as the treaty? Those five tribes went off there and each of 
them adopted its own written constitution. The constitutions of the Choctaw, 
Chickasaw, and the Cherokee tribes are admirable documents of organic law, and 
they were framed by lawyers as good as those who practice at the bar of the 
Supreme Court of the United States; and, besides that, they were native lawyers. 
They elected their president-sometimes calling him king-and both houses of 
their general assembly; and, according to their constitution and laws, they made 
all the appointments that were necessary to habilitate civil government out there. 
They have administered without stint, without reproach, and without 
reservation or question or criticism, civil law and criminal law; and many a 
man has been hung by those different civilized tribes by verdicts of juries, 
following the indictments of grand juries and the charges of circuit and other 
courts in the Indian Territory. They have their supreme court and they have 
their published books of decisions, and I have got them in my library. They 
have got all their statutes printed, and in the Cherokee Nation the statutes are 
printed in English and also in the original alphabet of the Cherokee tribe. Mr. 
Guess invented an alphabet of 88 letters, the most remarkable that has ever been 
produced, I think, in the annals of time. These governments have gone on--
Mr. WOLCOTT. Who did the Senator say invented the alpha-bet? I should like 
to hear his name. I did not understand it.
Mr. MORGAN. Mr. Guess. Sequoia is the Indian name for him; and the big 
trees upon the mountains in the great forests on the Pacific coast were named 
after him.
Now, sir, here have gone these five distinct constitutional governments, all 
republican in form, within the precincts and limits of the United States, all 
subject to our jurisdiction. They have elected their own governors, or kings, or 
rulers, and their legislatures; they have appointed their own judges; they have 
exercised all the powers of civil government, and do it to-day, except to the extent 
that we have invaded that country with judicial officers and judicial authority 
and have established United States courts within the territory of those Five 
Civilized Tribes.
I should like to know, Mr. President, what harm has ever come to the Indians 
from this? Why, sir, you may visit their families and you will find as refined and 
cultivated people amongst them as you will find anywhere. You will find their 
houses-very many of them-very, handsomely furnished, sumptuously 
furnished, with pianos and instruments of music and other things of that kind. 
Those governments have all grown up without any assistance from the 
Government of the United States. We have done nothing else except to pay the 
annuities to them that we owed them under treaties for land we obtained from 
them; we have voted them no money. They have had no representative in Con-
gress-an unheard-of and an unknown thing. They have remained there, 
keeping the peace and providing as well as they could for the welfare of the 
people, until they have grown into a properous and very patriotic community. 
We are now seeking, Mr. President, to coordinate them in some way into a 
Territorial government, a provision against which was put into the treaty. It 
was provided that they should not be made members of a Territorial 
government. The treaty says so.
I should like to know why we can not be as friendly toward the Hawaiians as 
we have been toward these Five Civilized Tribes? That is what I should like to 
know. Is there some reason for going down there and butchering those people, 
tearing up their institutions and their arrangements of government? Can any 
man on this floor point to a delinquency of that government, to a failure, or 
anything approaching it, that justifies a total revolution

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