the Maysville road bill, instances were numerous of
public men seeking to gain popular favor by holding out to the people
interested in particular localities the promise of large disbursements
of public money. Numerous reconnoissances and surveys were made during
that period for roads and canals through many parts of the Union, and
the people in the vicinity of each were led to believe that their
property would be enhanced in value and they themselves be enriched by
the large expenditures which they were promised by the advocates of the
system should be made from the Federal Treasury in their neighborhood.
Whole sections of the country were thus sought to be influenced, and the
system was fast becoming one not only of profuse and wasteful
expenditure, but a potent political engine.

If the power to improve a harbor be admitted, it is not easy to perceive
how the power to deepen every inlet on the ocean or the lakes and make
harbors where there are none can be denied. If the power to clear out or
deepen the channel of rivers near their mouths be admitted, it is not
easy to perceive how the power to improve them to their fountain head
and make them navigable to their sources can be denied. Where shall the
exercise of the power, if it be assumed, stop? Has Congress the power
when an inlet is deep enough to admit a schooner to deepen it still
more, so that it will admit ships of heavy burden, and has it not the
power when an inlet will admit a boat to make it deep enough to admit a
schooner? May it improve rivers deep enough already to float ships and
steamboats, and has it no power to improve those which are navigable
only for flatboats and barges? May the General Government exercise power
and jurisdiction over the soil of a State consisting of rocks and sand
bars in the beds of its rivers, and may it not excavate a canal around
its waterfalls or across its lands for precisely the same object?

Giving to the subject the most serious and candid consideration of which
my mind is capable, I can not perceive any intermediate grounds. The
power to improve harbors and rivers for purposes of navigation, by
deepening or clearing out, by dams and sluices, by locking or canalling,
must be admitted without any other limitation than the discretion of
Congress, or it must be denied altogether. If it be admitted, how broad
and how susceptible of enormous abuses is the power thus vested in the
General Government! There is not an inlet of