etween an appropriation of $10,000,000
directly from the money in the Treasury for the object contemplated and
the appropriation of lands presented for my sanction, and yet I can not
doubt that if the bill proposed $10,000,000 from the Treasury of the
United States for the support of the indigent insane in the several
States that the constitutional question involved in the act would have
attracted forcibly the attention of Congress.

I respectfully submit that in a constitutional point of view it is
wholly immaterial whether the appropriation be in money or in land.

The public domain is the common property of the Union just as much as
the surplus proceeds of that and of duties on imports remaining
unexpended in the Treasury. As such it has been pledged, is now pledged,
and may need to be so pledged again for public indebtedness.

As property it is distinguished from actual money chiefly in this
respect, that its profitable management sometimes requires that portions
of it be appropriated to local objects in the States wherein it may
happen to lie, as would be done by any prudent proprietor to enhance the
sale value of his private domain. All such grants of land are in fact
a disposal of it for value received, but they afford no precedent or
constitutional reason for giving away the public lands. Still less do
they give sanction to appropriations for objects which have not been
intrusted to the Federal Government, and therefore belong exclusively
to the States.

To assume that the public lands are applicable to ordinary State
objects, whether of public structures, police, charity, or expenses of
State administration, would be to disregard to the amount of the value
of the public lands all the limitations of the Constitution and confound
to that extent all distinctions between the rights and powers of the
States and those of the United States; for if the public lands may be
applied to the support of the poor, whether sane or insane, if the
disposal of them and their proceeds be not subject to the ordinary
limitations of the Constitution, then Congress possesses unqualified
power to provide for expenditures in the States by means of the public
lands, even to the degree of defraying the salaries of governors,
judges, and all other expenses of the government and internal
administration within the several States.

The conclusion from the general survey of the whole subject is to
my mind irresistible, and closes the ques