without their consent, for the purposes of internal improvement, and the eyes of eager millions were turned from the State governments to Congress as the fountain whose golden streams were to deepen their harbors and rivers, level their mountains, and fill their valleys with canals.  To what consequences this assumption of power was rapidly leading is shown by the veto messages of President Jackson, and to what end it is again tending is witnessed by the provisions of this bill and bills of similar character.

In the proceedings and debates of the General Convention which formed the Constitution and of the State conventions which adopted it nothing is found to countenance the idea that the one intended to propose or the others to concede such a grant of power to the General Government as the building up and maintaining of a system of internal improvements within the States necessarily implies.  Whatever the General Government may constitutionally create, it may lawfully protect.  If it may make a road upon the soil of the States, it may protect it from destruction or injury by penal laws.  So of canals, rivers, and harbors.  If it may put a dam in a river, it may protect that dam from removal or injury, in direct opposition to the laws, authorities, and people of the State in which it is situated.  If it may deepen a harbor, it may by its own laws protect its agents, and contractors from being driven from their work even by the laws and authorities of the State.  The power to make a road or canal or to dig up the bottom of a harbor or river implies a right in the soil of the State and a jurisdiction over it, for which it would be impossible to find any warrant.

The States were particularly jealous of conceding to the General Government any right of jurisdiction over their soil, and in the Constitution restricted the exclusive legislation of Congress to such places as might be “purchased with the consent of the States in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, dockyards, and other needful buildings.”  That the United States should be prohibited from purchasing lands within the States without their consent, even for the most essential purposes of national defense, while left at liberty to purchase or seize them for roads, canals, and other improvements of immeasurably less importance, is not to be conceived.

A proposition was made in the Convention to provide for the appointment of a “Secretary of Domestic Affairs,” and make it his duty, among other things, “to attend to the opening of roads and navigation and the facilitating communications through the United States.”  It was referred to a committee, and that appears to have been the last of it.  On a subsequent occasion a proposition was made to confer on Congress the power to “provide for the cutting of canals when deemed necessary,” which was rejected by the strong majority of eight States to three.  Among the reasons given for the rejection of this proposition, it was urged that “the expense in such cases will fall on the United States and the benefits accrue to the places where the canals may be cut.”