It is well known, Sir, that the annual appropriation bills always originate in the House of Representatives.  This is so much a matter of course, that no one ever looks to see such a bill first brought forward in the Senate.  It is also well known, Sir, that it has been usual, heretofore, to make the annual appropriations for the Military Academy at West Point in the general bill which provides for the pay and support of the army.  But last year the army bill did not contain any appropriation whatever for the support of West Point.  I took notice of this singular omission when the bill was before the Senate, but presumed, and indeed understood, that the House would send us a separate bill for the Military Academy.  The army bill, therefore, passed; but no bill for the Academy at West Point appeared.  We waited for it from day to day, and from week to week, but waited in vain.  At length, the time for sending bills from one house to the other, according to the joint rules of the two houses, expired, and no bill had made its appearance for the support of the Military Academy.  These joint rules, as is well known, are sometimes suspended on the application of one house to the other, in favor of particular bills, whose progress has been unexpectedly delayed, but which the public interest requires to be passed.  But the House of Representatives sent us no request to suspend the rules in favor of a bill for the support of the Military Academy, nor made any other proposition to save the institution from immediate dissolution.  Notwithstanding all the talk about a war, and the necessity of a vote for the three millions, the Military Academy, an institution cherished so long, and at so much expense, was on the very point of being entirely broken up.

Now it so happened, Sir, that at this time there was another appropriation bill which had come from the House of Representatives, and was before the Committee on Finance here.  This bill was entitled “An Act making appropriations for the civil and diplomatic expenses of the government for the year 1835.”

In this state of things, several members of the House of Representatives applied to the committee, and besought us to save the Military Academy by annexing the necessary appropriations for its support to the bill for civil and diplomatic service.  We spoke to them, in reply, of the unfitness, the irregularity, the incongruity, of this forced union of such dissimilar subjects; but they told us it was a case of absolute necessity, and that, without resorting to this mode, the appropriation could not get through.  We acquiesced, Sir, in these suggestions.  We went out of our way.  We agreed to do an extraordinary and an irregular thing, in order to save the public business from miscarriage.  By direction of the committee, I moved the Senate to add an appropriation for the Military Academy to the bill for defraying civil and diplomatic expenses.  The bill was so amended; and in this form the appropriation was finally made.