The necessity of a like authority over forts, magazines, &c. established by the general government, is not less evident. The public money expended on such places, and the public property deposited in them, require, that they should be exempt from the authority of the particular state. Nor would it be proper for the places on which the security of the entire union may depend, to be in any degree dependent on a particular member of it. All objections and scruples are here also obviated, by requiring the concurrence of the states concerned in every such establishment.
3. "To declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture, except during the life of the person attainted."
As treason may be committed against the United States, the authority of the United States ought to be enabled to punish it; but as new fangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free governments, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other, the convention have, with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for conviction of it, and restraining the congress, even in punishing it, from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.
4. "To admit new states into the union; but no new state shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other state; nor any state be formed by the junction of two or more states, or parts of states, without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned, as well as of the congress."
In the articles of confederation, no provision is found on this important subject. Canada was to be admitted of right, on her joining in the measures of the United States; and the other colonies, by which were evidently meant, the other British colonies, at the discretion of nine states. The eventual establishment of new states, seems to have been overlooked by the compilers of that
