ich has been to sustain
the public service independently of either of these fruitful sources of
discord will receive the final sanction of a people whose unbiased and
fairly elicited judgment upon public affairs is never ultimately wrong?

That embarrassments in the pecuniary concerns of individuals of
unexampled extent and duration have recently existed in this as in other
commercial nations is undoubtedly true. To suppose it necessary now
to trace these reverses to their sources would be a reflection on the
intelligence of my fellow-citizens. Whatever may have been the obscurity
in which the subject was involved during the earlier stages of the
revulsion, there can not now be many by whom the whole question is not
fully understood.

Not deeming it within the constitutional powers of the General
Government to repair private losses sustained by reverses in business
having no connection with the public service, either by direct
appropriations from the Treasury or by special legislation designed to
secure exclusive privileges and immunities to individuals or classes
in preference to or at the expense of the great majority necessarily
debarred from any participation in them, no attempt to do so has been
either made, recommended, or encouraged by the present Executive.

It is believed, however, that the great purposes for the attainment of
which the Federal Government was instituted have not been lost sight
of. Intrusted only with certain limited powers, cautiously enumerated,
distinctly specified, and defined with a precision and clearness which
would seem to defy misconstruction, it has been my constant aim to
confine myself within the limits so clearly marked out and so carefully
guarded. Having always been of opinion that the best preservative of
the union of the States is to be found in a total abstinence from the
exercise of all doubtful powers on the part of the Federal Government
rather than in attempts to assume them by a loose construction of the
Constitution or an ingenious perversion of its words, I have endeavored
to avoid recommending any measure which I had reason to apprehend would,
in the opinion even of a considerable minority of my fellow-citizens, be
regarded as trenching on the rights of the States or the provisions of
the hallowed instrument of our Union. Viewing the aggregate powers of
the Federal Government as a voluntary concession of the States, it
seemed to me that such only should be exercised