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For a correct understanding of the terms used in the third section of the fourth article, above quoted, reference should be had to the history of the times in which the Constitution was formed and adopted. It was decided upon in convention on the 17th September, 1787, and by it Congress was empowered "to dispose of," etc., "the territory or other property belonging to the United States." The only territory then belonging to the United States was that then recently ceded by the several States, to wit: by New York in 1781, by Virginia in 1784, by Massachusetts in 1785, and by South Carolina in August 1787, only the month before the formation of the Constitution. The cession from Virginia contained the following provision:

That all the lands within the territory so ceded to the United States, and not reserved or appropriated to any of the before-mentioned purposes or disposed of in bounties to the officers and soldiers of the American Army, shall be considered a common fund for the use and benefit of such of the United States as have become or shall become members of the Confederation or Federal Alliance of the said States, Virginia included, according to their respective proportions in the general charge and expenditure, and shall be faithfully and bona fide disposed of for that purpose and for no other use or purpose whatever.

Here the object for which these lands are to be disposed of is clearly set forth, and the power to dispose of them granted by the third section of the fourth article of the Constitution clearly contemplates such disposition only. If such be the fact, and in my mind there can be no doubt of it, then you have again not only no implication in favor of the contemplated grant, but the strongest authority against it. Furthermore, this bill is in violation of the faith of the Government pledged in the act of January 28, 1847. The nineteenth section of that act declares:

That for the payment of the stock which may be created under the provisions of this act the sales of the public lands are hereby pledged; and it is hereby made the duty of the Secretary of the Treasury to use and apply all moneys which may be received into the Treasury for the sales of the public lands after the 1st day of January, 1848, first, to pay the interest on all stocks issued by virtue of this act, and, secondly, to use the balance of said receipts, after paying the interest aforesaid, in the purchase of said stocks at their market value, etc.

The debts then contracted have not been liquidated, and the language of this section and the obligations of the United States under it are too plain to need comment.

I have been unable to discover any distinction on constitutional grounds or grounds of expediency between 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 are in fact a disposal 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 entrusted 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.