The application of the revenue of this Government, if the power to do so was admitted, to improving the navigation of the rivers by removing obstructions or otherwise would be for the most part productive only of local benefit.  The consequences might prove disastrously ruinous to as many of our fellow-citizens as the exercise of such power would benefit.  I will take one instance furnished by the present bill—­out of no invidious feeling, for such it would be impossible for me to feel, but because of my greater familiarity with locations—­in illustration of the above opinion:  Twenty thousand dollars are proposed to be appropriated toward improving the harbor of Richmond, in the State of Virginia.  Such improvement would furnish advantages to the city of Richmond and add to the value of the property of its citizens, while it might have a most disastrous influence over the wealth and prosperity of Petersburg, which is situated some 25 miles distant on a branch of James River, and which now enjoys its fair portion of the trade.  So, too, the improvement of James River to Richmond and of the Appomattox to Petersburg might, by inviting the trade to those two towns, have the effect of prostrating the town of Norfolk.  This, too, might be accomplished without adding a single vessel to the number now engaged in the trade of the Chesapeake Bay or bringing into the Treasury a dollar of additional revenue.  It would produce, most probably, the single effect of concentrating the commerce now profitably enjoyed by three places upon one of them.  This case furnishes an apt illustration of the effect of this bill in several other particulars.

There can not, in fact, be drawn the slightest discrimination between the improving the streams of a State under the power to regulate commerce and the most extended system of internal improvements on land.  The excavating a canal and paving a road are equally as much incidents to such claim of power as the removing obstructions from water courses; nor can such power be restricted by any fair course of reasoning to the mere fact of making the improvement.  It reasonably extends also to the right of seeking a return of the means expended through the exaction of tolls and the levying of contributions.  Thus, while the Constitution denies to this Government the privilege of acquiring a property in the soil of any State, even for the purpose of erecting a necessary fortification, without a grant from such State, this claim to power would invest it with control and dominion over the waters and soil of each State without restriction.  Power so incongruous can not exist in the same instrument.