ion I find but two examples in the acts
of Congress which furnish any precedent for the present bill, and those
examples will, in my opinion, serve rather as a warning than as an
inducement to tread in the same path.

The first is the act of March 3, 1819, granting a township of land to
the Connecticut asylum for the education of the deaf and dumb; the
second, that of April 5, 1826, making a similar grant of land to the
Kentucky asylum for teaching the deaf and dumb--the first more than
thirty years after the adoption of the Constitution and the second more
than a quarter of a century ago. These acts were unimportant as to the
amount appropriated, and so far as I can ascertain were passed on two
grounds: First, that the object was a charitable one, and, secondly,
that it was national. To say that it was a charitable object is only
to say that it was an object of expenditure proper for the competent
authority; but it no more tended to show that it was a proper object of
expenditure by the United States than is any other purely local object
appealing to the best sympathies of the human heart in any of the
States. And the suggestion that a school for the mental culture of the
deaf and dumb in Connecticut or Kentucky is a national object only
shows how loosely this expression has been used when the purpose was
to procure appropriations by Congress. It is not perceived how a school
of this character is otherwise national than is any establishment of
religious or moral instruction. All the pursuits of industry, everything
which promotes the material or intellectual well-being of the race,
every ear of corn or boll of cotton which grows, is national in the same
sense, for each one of these things goes to swell the aggregate of
national prosperity and happiness of the United States; but it confounds
all meaning of language to say that these things are "national," as
equivalent to "Federal," so as to come within any of the classes of
appropriation for which Congress is authorized by the Constitution
to legislate.

It is a marked point of the history of the Constitution that when it was
proposed to empower Congress to establish a university the proposition
was confined to the District intended for the future seat of Government
of the United States, and that even that proposed clause was omitted in
consideration of the exclusive powers conferred on Congress to legislate
for that District. Could a more decisive indication of the t