have been realized. Nearly four years have elapsed, and several
sessions of Congress have intervened, and no attempt within my
recollection has been made to induce Congress to exercise this power.
The applications for the construction of roads and canals which were
formerly multiplied upon your files are no longer presented, and we have
good reason to infer that the current of public sentiment has become
so decided against the pretension as effectually to discourage its
reassertion. So thinking, I derive the greatest satisfaction from the
conviction that thus much at least has been secured upon this important
and embarrassing subject.

From attempts to appropriate the national funds to objects which are
confessedly of a local character we can not, I trust, have anything
further to apprehend. My views in regard to the expediency of making
appropriations for works which are claimed to be of a national character
and prosecuted under State authority--assuming that Congress have the
right to do so--were stated in my annual message to Congress in 1830,
and also in that containing my objections to the Maysville road bill.

So thoroughly convinced am I that no such appropriations ought to
be made by Congress until a suitable constitutional provision is
made upon the subject, and so essential do I regard the point to the
highest interests of our country, that I could not consider myself as
discharging my duty to my constituents in giving the Executive sanction
to any bill containing such an appropriation. If the people of the
United States desire that the public Treasury shall be resorted to for
the means to prosecute such works, they will concur in an amendment of
the Constitution prescribing a rule by which the national character
of the works is to be tested, and by which the greatest practicable
equality of benefits may be secured to each member of the Confederacy.
The effects of such a regulation would be most salutary in preventing
unprofitable expenditures, in securing our legislation from the
pernicious consequences of a scramble for the favors of Government,
and in repressing the spirit of discontent which must inevitably arise
from an unequal distribution of treasures which belong alike to all.

There is another class of appropriations for what may be called, without
impropriety, internal improvements, which have always been regarded as
standing upon different grounds from those to which I have referred. I
allude to s