most serious consequences--communities deprived of
privileges which they have long enjoyed, or individuals oppressed and
punished in violation of the ordinary forms and guards of trial to
which they were accustomed and entitled. How different is the situation
of the United States! Nor can anything mark more strongly the great
characteristics of that difference than the grounds on which like
charges are raised against this Government. It is not alleged that any
portion of the community or any individual has been oppressed or that
money has been raised under a doubtful title. The principal charges are
that a work of great utility to the Union and affecting immediately
and with like advantage many of the States has been constructed; that
pensions to the surviving patriots of our Revolution, to patriots who
fought the battles and promoted the independence of their country, have
been granted, by money, too, raised not only without oppression, but
almost without being felt, and under an acknowledged constitutional
power.

From this view of the right to appropriate and of the practice under
it I think that I am authorized to conclude that the right to make
internal improvements has not been granted by the power "to pay the
debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare," included
in the first of the enumerated powers; that that grant conveys nothing
more than a right to appropriate the public money, and stands on the
same ground with the right to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts,
and excises, conveyed by the first branch of that power; that the
Government itself being limited, both branches of the power to raise
and appropriate the public money are also limited, the extent of the
Government as designated by the specific grants marking the extent
of the power in both branches, extending, however, to every object
embraced by the fair scope of those grants and not confined to a strict
construction of their respective powers, it being safer to aid the
purposes of those grants by the appropriation of money than to extend
by a forced construction the grant itself; that although the right to
appropriate the public money to such improvements affords a resource
indispensably necessary to such a scheme, it is nevertheless deficient
as a power in the great characteristics on which its execution depends.

The substance of what has been urged on this subject may be expressed in
a few words. My idea is that Congress hav