These ancient compacts are invaluable monuments of an age of virtue, patriotism, and disinterestedness.  They exhibit the price that great States which had won liberty were willing to pay for that union without which they plainly saw it could not be preserved.  It was not for territory or state power that our Revolutionary fathers took up arms; it was for individual liberty and the right of self-government.  The expulsion from the continent of British armies and British power was to them a barren conquest if through the collisions of the redeemed States the individual rights for which they fought should become the prey of petty military tyrannies established at home.  To avert such consequences and throw around liberty the shield of union, States whose relative strength at the time gave them a preponderating power magnanimously sacrificed domains which would have made them the rivals of empires, only stipulating that they should be disposed of for the common benefit of themselves and the other confederated States.  This enlightened policy produced union and has secured liberty.  It has made our waste lands to swarm with a busy people and added many powerful States to our Confederation.  As well for the fruits which these noble works of our ancestors have produced as for the devotedness in which they originated, we should hesitate before we demolish them.

But there are other principles asserted in the bill which would have impelled me to withhold my signature had I not seen in it a violation of the compacts by which the United States acquired title to a large portion of the public lands.  It reasserts the principle contained in the bill authorizing a subscription to the stock of the Maysville, Washington, Paris and Lexington Turnpike Road Company, from which I was compelled to withhold my consent for reasons contained in my message of the 27th May, 1830, to the House of Representatives.

The leading principle then asserted was that Congress possesses no constitutional power to appropriate any part of the moneys of the United States for objects of a local character within the States.  That principle I can not be mistaken in supposing has received the unequivocal sanction of the American people, and all subsequent reflection has but satisfied me more thoroughly that the interests of our people and the purity of our Government, if not its existence, depend on its observance.  The public lands are the common property of the United States, and the moneys arising from their sales are a part of the public revenue.  This bill proposes to raise from and appropriate a portion of this public revenue to certain States, providing expressly that it shall “be applied to objects of internal improvement or education within those States,” and then proceeds to appropriate the balance to all the States, with the declaration that it shall be applied “to such purposes as the legislatures of the said respective States shall deem proper.”  The former appropriation