erience of several of the States, as well as that of the United
States, during the period that Congress exercised the power of
appropriating the public money for internal improvements is full of
eloquent warnings. It seems impossible, in the nature of the subject, as
connected with local representation, that the several objects presented
for improvement shall be weighed according to their respective merits
and appropriations confined to those whose importance would justify a
tax on the whole community to effect their accomplishment.

In some of the States systems of internal improvements have been
projected, consisting of roads and canals, many of which, taken
separately, were not of sufficient public importance to justify a tax on
the entire population of the State to effect their construction, and yet
by a combination of local interests, operating on a majority of the
legislature, the whole have been authorized and the States plunged into
heavy debts. To an extent so ruinous has this system of legislation been
carried in some portions of the Union that the people have found it
necessary to their own safety and prosperity to forbid their
legislatures, by constitutional restrictions, to contract public debts
for such purposes without their immediate consent.

If the abuse of power has been so fatal in the States, where the systems
of taxation are direct and the representatives responsible at short
periods to small masses of constituents, how much greater danger of
abuse is to be apprehended in the General Government, whose revenues are
raised by indirect taxation and whose functionaries are responsible to
the people in larger masses and for longer terms.

Regarding only objects of improvement of the nature of those embraced in
this bill, how inexhaustible we shall find them. Let the imagination run
along our coast from the river St. Croix to the Rio Grande and trace
every river emptying into the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico to its source;
let it coast along our lakes and ascend all their tributaries; let it
pass to Oregon and explore all its bays, inlets, and streams; and then
let it raise the curtain of the future and contemplate the extent of
this Republic and the objects of improvement it will embrace as it
advances to its high destiny, and the mind will be startled at the
immensity and danger of the power which the principle of this bill
involves.

Already our Confederacy consists of twenty-nine States. Other Stat