on, possess it;
and no bill, therefore, which admits it can receive my official
sanction.

But in the other view of the power the question is differently situated.
The ground taken at an early period of the Government was "that whenever
money has been raised by the general authority and is to be applied to a
particular measure, a question arises whether the particular measure be
within the enumerated authorities vested in Congress. If it be, the
money requisite for it may be applied to it; if not, no such application
can be made." The document in which this principle was first advanced is
of deservedly high authority, and should be held in grateful remembrance
for its immediate agency in rescuing the country from much existing
abuse and for its conservative effect upon some of the most valuable
principles of the Constitution. The symmetry and purity of the
Government would doubtless have been better preserved if this
restriction of the power of appropriation could have been maintained
without weakening its ability to fulfill the general objects of its
institution, an effect so likely to attend its admission,
notwithstanding its apparent fitness, that every subsequent
Administration of the Government, embracing a period of thirty out of
the forty-two years of its existence, has adopted a more enlarged
construction of the power. It is not my purpose to detain you by a
minute recital of the acts which sustain this assertion, but it is
proper that I should notice some of the most prominent in order that the
reflections which they suggest to my mind may be better understood.

In the Administration of Mr. Jefferson we have two examples of the
exercise of the right of appropriation, which in the considerations that
led to their adoption and in their effects upon the public mind have had
a greater agency in marking the character of the power than any
subsequent events. I allude to the payment of $15,000,000 for the
purchase of Louisiana and to the original appropriation for the
construction of the Cumberland road, the latter act deriving much weight
from the acquiescence and approbation of three of the most powerful of
the original members of the Confederacy, expressed through their
respective legislatures. Although the circumstances of the latter case
may be such as to deprive so much of it as relates to the actual
construction of the road of the force of an obligatory exposition of the
Constitution, it must, nevertheless, b