But I can not so read the words “dispose of” as to make them embrace the idea of “giving away.”  The true meaning of words is always to be ascertained by the subject to which they are applied and the known general intent of the lawgiver.  Congress is a trustee under the Constitution for the people of the United States to “dispose of” their public lands, and I think I may venture to assert with confidence that no case can be found in which a trustee in the position of Congress has been authorized to “dispose of” property by its owner where it has been held that these words authorized such trustee to give away the fund intrusted to his care.  No trustee, when called upon to account for the disposition of the property placed under his management before any judicial tribunal, would venture to present such a plea in his defense.  The true meaning of these words is clearly stated by Chief Justice Taney in delivering the opinion of the court (19 Howard, p. 436).  He says in reference to this clause of the Constitution:  “It begins its enumeration of powers by that of disposing; in other words, making sale of the lands or raising money from them, which, as we have already said, was the main object of the cession (from the States), and which is the first thing provided for in the article.”  It is unnecessary to refer to the history of the times to establish the known fact that this statement of the Chief Justice is perfectly well founded.  That it never was intended by the framers of the Constitution that these lands should be given away by Congress is manifest from the concluding portion of the same clause.  By it Congress has power not only “to dispose of” the territory, but of the “other property of the United States.”  In the language of the Chief Justice (p. 437):  “And the same power of making needful rules respecting the territory is in precisely the same language applied to the other property of the United States, associating the power over the territory in this respect with the power over movable or personal property; that is, the ships, arms, or munitions of war, which then belonged in common to the State sovereignties.”

The question is still clearer in regard to the public lands in the States and Territories within the Louisiana and Florida purchases.  These lands were paid for out of the public Treasury from money raised by taxation.  Now if Congress had no power to appropriate the money with which these lands were purchased, is it not clear that the power over the lands is equally limited?  The mere conversion of this money into land could not confer upon Congress new power over the disposition of land which they had not possessed over money.  If it could, then a trustee, by changing the character of the fund intrusted to his care for special objects from money into land, might give the land away or devote it to any purpose he thought proper, however foreign from the trust.  The inference is irresistible that this land partakes of the very