“President Jefferson, in his message to Congress in 1806, recommended an amendment of the Constitution, with a view to apply an anticipated surplus in the treasury ’to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of the federal powers’; and he adds:  ’I suppose an amendment to the Constitution, by consent of the States, necessary, because the objects now recommended are not among those enumerated in the Constitution, and to which it permits the public moneys to be applied.’  In 1825, he repeated in his published letters the opinion that no such power has been conferred upon Congress.”

I introduce this not to controvert just now the constitutional opinion, but to show that, on the question of expediency, Mr. Jefferson’s opinion was against the present President; that this opinion of Mr. Jefferson, in one branch at least, is in the hands of Mr. Polk like McFingal’s gun—­“bears wide and kicks the owner over.”

But to the constitutional question.  In 1826 Chancellor Kent first published his Commentaries on American law.  He devoted a portion of one of the lectures to the question of the authority of Congress to appropriate public moneys for internal improvements.  He mentions that the subject had never been brought under judicial consideration, and proceeds to give a brief summary of the discussion it had undergone between the legislative and executive branches of the government.  He shows that the legislative branch had usually been for, and the executive against, the power, till the period of Mr. J.Q.  Adams’s administration, at which point he considers the executive influence as withdrawn from opposition, and added to the support of the power.  In 1844 the chancellor published a new edition of his Commentaries, in which he adds some notes of what had transpired on the question since 1826.  I have not time to read the original text on the notes; but the whole may be found on page 267, and the two or three following pages, of the first volume of the edition of 1844.  As to what Chancellor Kent seems to consider the sum of the whole, I read from one of the notes: 

“Mr. Justice Story, in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, Vol.  II., pp. 429-440, and again pp. 519-538, has stated at large the arguments for and against the proposition that Congress have a constitutional authority to lay taxes and to apply the power to regulate commerce as a means directly to encourage and protect domestic manufactures; and without giving any opinion of his own on the contested doctrine, he has left the reader to draw his own conclusions.  I should think, however, from the arguments as stated, that every mind which has taken no part in the discussion, and felt no prejudice or territorial bias on either side of the question, would deem the arguments in favor of the Congressional power vastly superior.”