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Show comineroe on her waterways by native and by stranger was denied at the pleasure of riparian sovereigns or' "taxed and tolled" for all the traffic would bear and more. It was at the close of the Thirty Years. War, in I6I4.8, that more than three hundred European potentates or their representatives met in a Congress at Osnabruck and at Munster to formulate the Treaty of Westphalia, in which the conception of sovereignty was externally recognized; and there modern inter- national law was born. England> very busy at home with Cromwell and Charles I, did not participate in the Congress; but no nation was more prompt than England in accepting its general benefits and asserting the- principles of sovereignty there approved by the attending Powers. International law, as reborn at Westphalia, proceeds from the consent of sovereigns to fix their common standard of conduct in dealing with each other. And it must be assumed that such first consent of The Dutch Netherlands, France and Spain at Westphalia, and the acquiescence of absent England, was broad enough to include their colonial empires then budding from settlements implanted in Virginia- at Jamestown, and in New England at Plymouth, Boston and other places; in the new Netherlands at New Amsterdam and Orange, now.New York and Albany; in New France at Quebec and Montreal, with French explorers and traders breaking the trails to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi; and in New Spain at Havana, St. Augustine, Santa.Fe, and upon the plundered ruins of the ancient City of Mexico. In short, the crude mantle of international law woven at "the Congress of Westphalia-was as broad as the sovereignty of the as- senting Pcwers; and that sovereignty extended over nearly all of North America.5 day'writers to discard sovereignty as an obsolete conception and then substitute the same "thing under another name. *+For definition of sovereignty or sovereign power as the same exists in the United States, and for comparison of state sovereignty with European sovereign- ty, see Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 Pall.. (U.S.) hX9, 1 L-Ed. I4I4D (1793). Sovereign- ty in the United States of America is self-distributed and self-regulated by written constitutions, but is none the less superior to-, every conceivable pri- vate righ-fc. 5Bull of Pope Alexander Conceding America to Spain, year lh93'> Letters Patent to John Cabot by King Henry VII, year I496; Letters Patent to Sir Humphrey Gylverte by Queen Elizabeth, year 1578; Charter to Sir Walter Raleigh by Queen Slizabeth, year I58I4.; Charter of the Dutch West India Company by the States-General of the United Netherlands, year 1621; Sir Robert death's Patent 5 Charles 1st, year 1629; The Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England, year 1614-3; all as found in 1 Thorpe's Constitutions,' I4I-8I (Officially: "The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies. Now or Heretofore Forming tine United States of America," compiled and edited under the Act of Congress of June 30, 19^6, by Francis Newton Thorpe, and published by the Government Printing Office, in the year I9O9). See aLso, Virginia Charter of 1606, 7 Thorpe's Constitutions, 3783J Mary- land Charter of 1632, 3 Thorpe's Constitutions, 1669. The sovereignty of the English Monarch over all water rights and privileges in the British dominions shortly after the time of the Congress of Westphalia is indicated by the grant of Charles II to his brother James., Duke of Yox-k, of all that part of the mainland of New England between the St. Croix River next adjoining to New Scotland and Delaware Bay "together with the rivers, harbours, |