sary 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 far as respects the aggregate people
of the United States, as meaning nothing more than to allow to Congress
the controllin