imits of a particular State. They are all powers that regard
matters which extend beyond not only the individual citizen, but the
individual State, and affect alike the relations and interests of all
the States, or matters which cannot be disposed of by a State
government without the exercise of extra-territorial jurisdiction.
They give the government no jurisdiction of questions which affect
individuals or citizens only in their private and domestic relations
which lie wholly within a particular State. The General government
does not legislate concerning private rights, whether of persons or
things, the tenure of real estate, marriage, dower, inheritance, wills,
the transferrence or transmission of property, real or personal; it can
charter no private corporations, out of the District of Columbia, for
business, literary, scientific, or eleemosynary purposes, establish no
schools, found no colleges or universities, and promote science and the
useful arts only by securing to authors and inventors for a time the
exclusive right to their writings and discoveries. The United States
Bank was manifestly unconstitutional, as probably are the present
so-called national banks. The United States Bank was a private or
particular corporation, and the present national banks are only
corporations of the same sort, though organized under a general law.
The pretence that they are established to supply a national currency,
does not save their constitutionality, for the convention has not given
the General government the power nor imposed on it the duty of
furnishing a national currency. To coin money, and regulate the value
thereof, is something very different from authorizing private companies
to issue bank notes, on the basis of the public stocks held as private
property, or even on what is called a specie basis. To claim the power
under the general welfare clause would be a simple mockery of good
sense. It is no more for the general welfare than any other successful
private business. The private welfare of each is, no doubt, for the
welfare of all, but not therefore is it the "general welfare," for what
is private, particular in its nature, is not and cannot be general. To
understand by general welfare that which is for the individual welfare
of all or the greater number, would be to claim for the General
government all the powers of government, and to deny that very division
of powers which is the crowning merit of the America