Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“ It is true that, in further promising to secure the Nation from all laws except those enacted by their own national councils, the 4th article adds, 'not inconsistent with the Constitution, treaties, and laws of the United States;' but this addition is far from suggesting that a constitutional right of property has been conferred upon a designated class, that might be enforced in a circuit court of the United States by a bill in equity against what was called a Nation. ”

“ They say and argue, as they must, in order to make out their right to a distribution to themselves, that the Choctaws and Chickasaws no longer exist as nations. But, if so, the grant also was at an end when the nations ceased to be, and it rested with the bounty of the United States to decide what should be done with the land, except so far as it already had been decided by treaties or statutes upon which the plaintiffs do not and cannot rely. ”

“ There is not a suggestion of any trust in the language to either the technical or the unlearned reader, and it is most unlikely that the United States would have attempted to impose one upon the Choctaws in favor of the existing members of the tribe in the very 'treaty' that dealt with them as a quasi independent nation, recognized by article 5 as having the right to make war, and that, by the 4th article, bound the United States to secure to that nation 'the jurisdiction and government of all the persons and property that may be within their limits west,' etc. ”