ess by which the
character of the country for generosity and nobleness of feeling may be
destroyed by the great increase and neck toleration of usury, it is an
exclusive metallic currency.

Amongst the other duties of a delicate character which the President is
called upon to perform is the supervision of the government of the
Territories of the United States. Those of them which are destined to
become members of our great political family are compensated by their
rapid progress from infancy to manhood for the partial and temporary
deprivation of their political rights. It is in this District only where
American citizens are to be found who under a settled policy are
deprived of many important political privileges without any inspiring
hope as to the future. Their only consolation under circumstances of
such deprivation is that of the devoted exterior guards of a camp--that
their sufferings secure tranquillity and safety within. Are there any of
their countrymen, who would subject them to greater sacrifices, to any
other humiliations than those essentially necessary to the security of
the object for which they were thus separated from their
fellow-citizens? Are their rights alone not to be guaranteed by the
application of those great principles upon which all our constitutions
are founded? We are told by the greatest of British orators and
statesmen that at the commencement of the War of the Revolution the most
stupid men in England spoke of "their American subjects." Are there,
indeed, citizens of any of our States who have dreamed of their subjects
in the District of Columbia? Such dreams can never be realized by any
agency of mine. The people of the District of Columbia are not the
subjects of the people of the States, but free American citizens. Being
in the latter condition when the Constitution was formed, no words used
in that instrument could have been intended to deprive them of that
character. If there is anything in the great principle of unalienable
rights so emphatically insisted upon in our Declaration of Independence,
they could neither make nor the United States accept a surrender of
their liberties and become the subjects--in other words, the slaves--of
their former fellow-citizens. If this be true--and it will scarcely be
denied by anyone who has a correct idea of his own rights as an American
citizen--the grant to Congress of exclusive jurisdiction in the District
of Columbia can be interpreted, so fa