road will be the most effective and powerful check that can be interposed by the government upon Indian depredations and aggressions upon our frontiers or upon each other; the northern tribes upon the southern, and the southern upon the northern.  You cut them in two.  You will be constantly in their midst, and cut off their intercommunication and hostile depredations.  You will have a line of quasi fortifications, a line of posts and stations, with settlements on each side of the road.  Every few miles you will thus have settlements strong enough to defend themselves against inroads of the Indians, and so constituting a wall of separation between the Indian tribes, composed of a white population, with arms in their hands.  This object alone would, perhaps, be worth as much as the road will cost; and when I speak of what the road will be worth in this respect, I mean to say, that besides the prevention of savage warfare, the effusion of blood, it will save millions of dollars to the treasury annually, in the greater economy attained in moving troops and military supplies and preventing hostilities.

. . .

I have been thus particular in noting these things because I want to show where or on which side the balance will be found in the adjustment of the responsibility account between the friends and the opponents of this measure—­which will have the heaviest account to settle with the country.

For myself, I am not wedded to this particular scheme.  Rather than have no road, I would prefer to adopt other projects.  I am now advocating one which I supposed would meet the views of a greater number of Senators than any other.  I think great honor is due to Mr. Whitney for having originated the scheme, and having obtained the sanction of the legislatures of seventeen or eighteen States of the Union.  Rather than have the project altogether fail, I would be willing to adopt this plan.  It may not offer the same advantages for a speedy consummation of the work; but still, we would have a road in prospect, and that would be a great deal.  But if gentlemen are to rise here in their places year after year—­and this is the fifth year from the time we ought to have undertaken this work—­and tell us it is just time to commence a survey, we will never have a road.  The honorable Senator from South Carolina [Mr. Butler] says there ought to be some limitation in this idea of progress, when regarded as a spur to great activity and energy, as to what we shall do in our day.  He says we have acquired California; we have opened up those rich regions on our western borders, which promises such magnificent results; and he asks, is not that enough for the present generation?  Leave it to the nest generation to construct a work of such magnitude as this—­requiring forty millions of dollars from the government.  Mr. President, I have said that if the condition was a road or no road, I would regard one hundred and fifty millions of dollars as well laid out by the government for the work; though I have no idea that it will take such an amount.  Eighty or one hundred millions of dollars will build the road.