ning to the
new Western States their own proportion of this public property, and
aiding them in the design of grasping all the lands in their own hands.
Thomas H. Benton was the author of this system, which he brought forward
as a substitute for the American system of Mr. Clay, and to supplant the
latter as the leading statesman of the West. Mr. Clay, by his tariff
compromise with Mr. Calhoun, abandoned his own American system. At the
same time he brought forward a plan for distributing among all the
states of the Union the proceeds of the sales of the public lands. His
bill for that purpose passed both houses of Congress, but was vetoed by
President Jackson, who, in his annual message of December, 1832,
formally recommended that all the public lands should be gratuitously
given away to individual adventurers, and to the states in which the
lands are situated. "Now," said Mr. Adams, "if, at this time, on the eve
of a presidential election, I should, in a public address to the
American Institute, disclose the state of things, and comment upon it as
I should feel it my duty to do, it would probably produce a great
excitement and irritation; would be charged with having a political
bearing, and subject me to the imputation of tampering with the
election."

On the 25th of May, 1836, Mr. Adams delivered, in the House of
Representatives, a speech on certain resolutions for distributing
rations from the public stores to the distressed fugitives from Indian
hostilities in the States of Alabama and Georgia. "It is," said he, "I
believe, the first example of a system of gratuitous donations to our
own countrymen, infinitely more formidable in its consequences as a
precedent, than from anything appearing on its face. I shall,
nevertheless, vote for it." "It is one of a class of legislative
enactments with which we are already becoming familiar, and which, I
greatly fear, will ere long grow voluminous. I shall take the liberty
to denominate them _the scalping-knife and tomahawk laws_. They are all
urged through by the terror of those instruments of death, under the
most affecting and pathetic appeals, from the constituents of the
sufferers, to all the tender and benevolent sympathies of our nature.
It is impossible for me to withhold from those appeals a responsive and
yielding voice." He had voted, he said, for millions after millions,
and would again and again vote for drafts from the public chest for the
same purpose, should th