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The conclusion from the general survey of the whole subject is to my mind irresistible, and closes the question both of right and expediency so far as regards the principle of the appropriation proposed in this bill. Would not the admission of such power in Congress to dispose of the public domain work the practical abrogation of some of the most important provisions of the Constitution?

If the systematic reservation of a definite proportion of the public lands (the sixteenth sections) in the States for the purposes of education and occasional grants for similar purposes be cited as contradicting these conclusions, the answer as it appears to be is obvious and satisfactory. Such reservations and grants, besides being a part of the conditions on which the proprietary right of the United States is maintained, along with the eminent domain of a particular State, and by which the public land remains free from taxation in the State in which it lies as long as it remains the property of the United States, are the acts of a mere land-owner disposing of a small share of his property in a way to augment the value of the residue and in this mode to encourage the early occupation of it by the industrious and intelligent pioneer.

The great example of apparent donation of lands to the United States likely to be relied upon as sustaining the principles of this bill is the relinquishment of swamp lands to the States in which they are situated, but this also, like other grants already referred to, was based expressly upon grounds clearly distinguishable in principle from any which can be assumed for the bill herewith returned, viz., upon the interest and duty of the proprietor. They were charged, and not without reason, to be a nuisance to the inhabitants of the surrounding country. The measure was predicated not only upon the ground of the disease inflicted upon the people of the United States, which the United States could not justify as a just and honest proprietor, but also upon an express limitation of the application of the proceeds in the first instance to purposes of levees and drains, thus protecting the health of the inhabitants and at the same time enhancing the value of the remaining lands belonging to the General Government.

It is not to be denied that Congress, while administering the public land as a proprietor within the principle distinctly announced in my annual message, may sometimes have failed to distinguish accurately between objects which are and which are not within its constitutional powers.

After a most careful examination 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 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 to procure appropriations by Congress. It is not perceived how a school of this character is otherwise than national than is any establishment of moral or religious 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 in 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 mere indication of the true construction and spirit of the Constitution in regard to all matters of this nature have been given? It proves that such objects were considered by the Convention as appertaining to local legislation only; that they were not comprehended, either expressly or by implication, in the grant of general power to Congress, and that consequently they remained within the several States.