WASHINGTON, December 30, 1854.

To the Senate and House of Representatives: 

In returning to the House of Representatives, in which it originated, a bill entitled “An act making appropriations for the repair, preservation, and completion of certain public works heretofore commenced under the authority of law,” it became necessary for me, owing to the late day at which the bill was passed, to state my objections to it very briefly, announcing at the same time a purpose to resume the subject for more deliberate discussion at the present session of Congress; for, while by no means insensible of the arduousness of the task thus undertaken by me, I conceived that the two Houses were entitled to an exposition of the considerations which had induced dissent on my part from their conclusions in this instance.

The great constitutional question of the power of the General Government in relation to internal improvements has been the subject of earnest difference of opinion at every period of the history of the United States.  Annual and special messages of successive Presidents have been occupied with it, sometimes in remarks on the general topic and frequently in objection to particular bills.  The conflicting sentiments of eminent statesmen, expressed in Congress or in conventions called expressly to devise, if possible, some plan calculated to relieve the subject of the embarrassments with which it is environed, while they have directed public attention strongly to the magnitude of the interests involved, have yet left unsettled the limits, not merely of expediency, but of constitutional power, in relation to works of this class by the General Government.

What is intended by the phrase “internal improvements”?  What does it embrace and what exclude?  No such language is found in the Constitution.  Not only is it not an expression of ascertainable constitutional power, but it has no sufficient exactness of meaning to be of any value as the basis of a safe conclusion either of constitutional law or of practical statesmanship.

President John Quincy Adams, in claiming on one occasion, after his retirement from office, the authorship of the idea of introducing into the administration of the affairs of the General Government “a permanent and regular system” of internal improvements, speaks of it as a system by which “the whole Union would have been checkered over with railroads and canals,” affording “high wages and constant employment to hundreds of thousands of laborers;” and he places it in express contrast with the construction of such works by the legislation of the States and by private enterprise.