The fourth resolution declares the expediency of Mr. Clay’s land bill.  Much incomprehensible jargon is often used against the constitutionality of this measure.  We forbear, in this place, attempting an answer to it, simply because, in our opinion, those who urge it are through party zeal resolved not to see or acknowledge the truth.  The question of expediency, at least so far as Illinois is concerned, seems to us the clearest imaginable.  By the bill we are to receive annually a large sum of money, no part of which we otherwise receive.  The precise annual sum cannot be known in advance; it doubtless will vary in different years.  Still it is something to know that in the last year—­a year of almost unparalleled pecuniary pressure—­it amounted to more than forty thousand dollars.  This annual income, in the midst of our almost insupportable difficulties, in the days of our severest necessity, our political opponents are furiously resolving to take and keep from us.  And for what?  Many silly reasons are given, as is usual in cases where a single good one is not to be found.  One is that by giving us the proceeds of the lands we impoverish the national treasury, and thereby render necessary an increase of the tariff.  This may be true; but if so, the amount of it only is that those whose pride, whose abundance of means, prompt them to spurn the manufactures of our country, and to strut in British cloaks and coats and pantaloons, may have to pay a few cents more on the yard for the cloth that makes them.  A terrible evil, truly, to the Illinois farmer, who never wore, nor ever expects to wear, a single yard of British goods in his whole life.  Another of their reasons is that by the passage and continuance of Mr. Clay’s bill, we prevent the passage of a bill which would give us more.  This, if it were sound in itself, is waging destructive war with the former position; for if Mr. Clay’s bill impoverishes the treasury too much, what shall be said of one that impoverishes it still more?  But it is not sound in itself.  It is not true that Mr. Clay’s bill prevents the passage of one more favorable to us of the new States.  Considering the strength and opposite interest of the old States, the wonder is that they ever permitted one to pass so favorable as Mr. Clay’s.  The last twenty-odd years’ efforts to reduce the price of the lands, and to pass graduation bills and cession bills, prove the assertion to be true; and if there were no experience in support of it, the reason itself is plain.  The States in which none, or few, of the public lands lie, and those consequently interested against parting with them except for the best price, are the majority; and a moment’s reflection will show that they must ever continue the majority, because by the time one of the original new States (Ohio, for example) becomes populous and gets weight in Congress, the public lands in her limits are so nearly sold out that in every point material to this question she becomes