ations of money by
Congress to aid works of internal improvement, for although the
extension of the power to apply money beyond that of carrying into
effect the object for which it is appropriated has, as we have seen,
been long claimed and exercised by the Federal Government, yet such
grants have always been professedly under the control of the general
principle that the works which might be thus aided should be "of a
general, not local, national, not State," character. A disregard of this
distinction would of necessity lead to the subversion of the federal
system. That even this is an unsafe one, arbitrary in its nature, and
liable, consequently, to great abuses, is too obvious to require the
confirmation of experience. It is, however, sufficiently definite and
imperative to my mind to forbid my approbation of any bill having the
character of the one under consideration. I have given to its provisions
all the reflection demanded by a just regard for the interests of those
of our fellow-citizens who have desired its passage, and by the respect
which is due to a coordinate branch of the Government, but I am not able
to view it in any other light than as a measure of purely local
character; or, if it can be considered national, that no further
distinction between the appropriate duties of the General and State
Governments need be attempted, for there can be no local interest that
may not with equal propriety be denominated national. It has no
connection with any established system of improvements; is exclusively
within the limits of a State, starting at a point on the Ohio River and
running out 60 miles to an interior town, and even as far as the State
is interested conferring partial instead of general advantages.

Considering the magnitude and importance of the power, and the
embarrassments to which, from the very nature of the thing, its exercise
must necessarily be subjected, the real friends of internal improvement
ought not to be willing to confide it to accident and chance. What is
properly _national_ in its character or otherwise is an inquiry which is
often extremely difficult of solution. The appropriations of one year
for an object which is considered national may be rendered nugatory by
the refusal of a succeeding Congress to continue the work on the ground
that it is local. No aid can be derived from the intervention of
corporations. The question regards the character of the work, not that
of those by whom i