navigation, commerce, manufactures, the fisheries, and the mechanic arts.  The duties of the government, then, certainly extend over all this territory, and embrace all these vast interests.  We have a maritime frontier, a sea-coast of many thousand miles; and while no one doubts that it is the duty of government to defend this coast by suitable military preparations, there are those who yet suppose that the powers of government stop at this point; and that as to works of peace and works of improvement, they are beyond our constitutional limits.  I have ever thought otherwise.  Congress has a right, no doubt, to declare war, and to provide armies and navies; and it has necessarily the right to build fortifications and batteries, to protect the coast from the effects of war.  But Congress has authority also, and it is its duty, to regulate commerce, and it has the whole power of collecting duties on imports and tonnage.  It must have ports and harbors, and dock-yards also, for its navies.  Very early in the history of the government, it was decided by Congress, on the report of a highly respectable committee, that the transfer by the States to Congress of the power of collecting tonnage and other duties, and the grant of the authority to regulate commerce, charged Congress, necessarily, with the duty of maintaining such piers and wharves and lighthouses, and of making such improvements, as might have been expected to be done by the States, if they had retained the usual means, by retaining the power of collecting duties on imports.  The States, it was admitted, had parted with this power; and the duty of protecting and facilitating commerce by these means had passed, along with this power, into other hands.  I have never hesitated, therefore, when the state of the treasury would admit, to vote for reasonable appropriations, for breakwaters, lighthouses, piers, harbors, and similar public works, on any part of the whole Atlantic coast or the Gulf of Mexico, from Maine to Louisiana.

But how stands the inland frontier?  How is it along the vast lakes and the mighty rivers of the North and West?  Do our constitutional rights and duties terminate where the water ceases to be salt? or do they exist, in full vigor, on the shores of these inland seas?  I never could doubt about this; and yet, Gentlemen, I remember even to have participated in a warm debate, in the Senate, some years ago, upon the constitutional right of Congress to make an appropriation for a pier in the harbor of Buffalo.  What! make a harbor at Buffalo, where Nature never made any, and where therefore it was never intended any ever should be made!  Take money from the people to run out piers from the sandy shores of Lake Erie, or deepen the channels of her shallow rivers!  Where was the constitutional authority for this?  Where would such strides of power stop?  How long would the States have any power at all left, if their territory might be ruthlessly invaded for such unhallowed purposes, or