uch as have for their object the improvement of our harbors,
the removal of partial and temporary obstructions in our navigable
rivers, for the facility and security of our foreign commerce. The
grounds upon which I distinguished appropriations of this character from
others have already been stated to Congress. I will now only add that at
the first session of Congress under the new Constitution it was provided
by law that all expenses which should accrue from and after the 15th day
of August, 1789, in the necessary support and maintenance and repairs of
all light-houses, beacons, buoys, and public piers erected, placed, or
sunk before the passage of the act within any bay, inlet, harbor, or
port of the United States, for rendering the navigation thereof easy and
safe, should be defrayed out of the Treasury of the United States, and,
further, that it should be the duty of the Secretary of the Treasury
to provide by contracts, with the approbation of the President, for
rebuilding when necessary and keeping in good repair the light-houses,
beacons, buoys, and public piers in the several States, and for
furnishing them with supplies. Appropriations for similar objects have
been continued from that time to the present without interruption or
dispute. As a natural consequence of the increase and extension of our
foreign commerce, ports of entry and delivery have been multiplied and
established, not only upon our seaboard, but in the interior of the
country upon our lakes and navigable rivers. The convenience and
safety of this commerce have led to the gradual extension of these
expenditures; to the erection of light-houses, the placing, planting,
and sinking of buoys, beacons, and piers, and to the removal of partial
and temporary obstructions in our navigable rivers and in the harbors
upon our Great Lakes as well as on the seaboard. Although I have
expressed to Congress my apprehension that these expenditures have
sometimes been extravagant and disproportionate to the advantages to be
derived from them, I have not felt it to be my duty to refuse my assent
to bills containing them, and have contented myself to follow in this
respect in the footsteps of all my predecessors. Sensible, however, from
experience and observation of the great abuses to which the unrestricted
exercise of this authority by Congress was exposed, I have prescribed a
limitation for the government of my own conduct by which expenditures of
this character ar