There is another sentiment in this part of the message, which we should hardly have expected to find in a paper which is supposed, whoever may have drawn it up, to have passed under the review of professional characters.  The message declares, that this limitation to create no other bank is unconstitutional, because, although Congress may use the discretion vested in them, “they may not limit the discretion of their successors.”  This reason is almost too superficial to require an answer.  Every one at all accustomed to the consideration of such subjects knows that every Congress can bind its successors to the same extent that it can bind itself.  The power of Congress is always the same; the authority of law always the same.  It is true, we speak of the Twentieth Congress and the Twenty-first Congress, but this is only to denote the period of time, or to mark the successive organizations of the House of Representatives under the successive periodical election of its members.  As a politic body, as the legislative power of the government, Congress is always continuous, always identical.  A particular Congress, as we speak of it, for instance, the present Congress, can no farther restrain itself from doing what it may choose to do at the next session, than it can restrain any succeeding Congress from doing what it may choose.  Any Congress may repeal the act or law of its predecessor, if in its nature it be repealable, just as it may repeal its own act; and if a law or an act be irrepealable in its nature, it can no more be repealed by a subsequent Congress than by that which passed it.  All this is familiar to everybody.  And Congress, like every other legislature, often passes acts which, being in the nature of grants or contracts, are irrepealable ever afterwards.  The message, in a strain of argument which it is difficult to treat with ordinary respect, declares that this restriction on the power of Congress, as to the establishment of other banks, is a palpable attempt to amend the Constitution by an act of legislation.  The reason on which this observation purports to be founded is, that Congress, by the Constitution, is to have exclusive legislation over the District of Columbia; and when the bank charter declares that Congress will create no new bank within the District, it annuls this power of exclusive legislation!  I must say, that this reasoning hardly rises high enough to entitle it to a passing notice.  It would be doing it too much credit to call it plausible.  No one needs to be informed that exclusive power of legislation is not unlimited power of legislation; and if it were, how can that legislative power be unlimited that cannot restrain itself, that cannot bind itself by contract?  Whether as a government or as an individual, that being is fettered and restrained which is not capable of binding itself by ordinary obligation.  Every legislature binds itself, whenever it makes a grant, enters into a contract, bestows an office, or does any other act or thing which is in its nature irrepealable.  And this, instead of detracting from its legislative power, is one of the modes of exercising that power.  The legislative power of Congress over the District of Columbia would not be full and complete, if it might not make just such a stipulation as the bank charter contains.