surpluses be appropriated, and the whole
surplus of impost, after the entire discharge of the public debt, and
during those intervals when the purposes of war shall not call for them?
Shall we suppress the impost and give that advantage to foreign over
domestic manufactures? On a few articles of more general and necessary
use the suppression in due season will doubtless be right, but the great
mass of the articles on which impost is paid are foreign luxuries,
purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the
use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance
and application to the great purposes of the public education, roads,
rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may
be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of Federal
powers. By these operations new channels of communication will be opened
between the States, the lines of separation will disappear, their
interests will be identified, and their union cemented by new and
indissoluble ties. Education is here placed among the articles of public
care, not that it would be proposed to take its ordinary branches out
of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all
the concerns to which it is equal, but a public institution can alone
supply those sciences which though rarely called for are yet necessary
to complete the circle, all the parts of which contribute to the
improvement of the country and some of them to its preservation. The
subject is now proposed for the consideration of Congress, because if
approved by the time the State legislatures shall have deliberated on
this extension of the Federal trusts, and the laws shall be passed and
other arrangements made for their execution, the necessary funds will
be on hand and without employment. I suppose an amendment to the
Constitution, by consent of the States, necessary, because the objects
now recommended are not among those enumerated in the Constitution, and
to which it permits the public moneys to be applied.

The present consideration of a national establishment for education
particularly is rendered proper by this circumstance also, that if
Congress, approving the proposition, shall yet think it more eligible
to found it on a donation of lands, they have it now in their power to
endow it with those which will be among the earliest to produce the
necessary income. This foundation would have the advantage of being
in