same character with the money paid for it, and can be devoted to no objects different from those to which the money could have been devoted.  If this were not the case, then by the purchase of a new territory from a foreign government out of the public Treasury Congress could enlarge their own powers and appropriate the proceeds of the sales of the land thus purchased, at their own discretion, to other and far different objects from what they could have applied the purchase money which had been raised by taxation.

2.  It will prove unequal and unjust in its operation among the actual settlers themselves.

The first settlers of a new country are a most meritorious class.  They brave the dangers of savage warfare, suffer the privations of a frontier life, and with the hand of toil bring the wilderness into cultivation.  The “old settlers,” as they are everywhere called, are public benefactors.  This class have all paid for their lands the Government price, or $1.25 per acre.  They have constructed roads, established schools, and laid the foundation of prosperous commonwealths.  Is it just, is it equal, that after they have accomplished all this by their labor new settlers should come in among them and receive their farms at the price of 25 or 18 cents per acre?  Surely the old settlers, as a class, are entitled to at least equal benefits with the new.  If you give the new settlers their land for a comparatively nominal price, upon every principle of equality and justice you will be obliged to refund out of the common Treasury the difference which the old have paid above the new settlers for their land.

3.  This bill will do great injustice to the old soldiers who have received land warrants for their services in fighting the battles of their country.  It will greatly reduce the market value of these warrants.  Already their value has sunk for 160-acre warrants to 67 cents per acre under an apprehension that such a measure as this might become a law.  What price would they command when any head of a family may take possession of a quarter section of land and not pay for it until the end of five years, and then at the rate of only 25 cents per acre?  The magnitude of the interest to be affected will appear in the fact that there are outstanding unsatisfied land warrants reaching back to the last war with Great Britain, and even Revolutionary times, amounting in round numbers to seven and a half millions of acres.

4.  This bill will prove unequal and unjust in its operation, because from its nature it is confined to one class of our people.  It is a boon exclusively conferred upon the cultivators of the soil.  Whilst it is cheerfully admitted that these are the most numerous and useful class of our fellow-citizens and eminently deserve all the advantages which our laws have already extended to them, yet there should be no new legislation which would operate to the injury or embarrassment of the large body of respectable