therefore may be expedient for the General Government to take
in hand. Accordingly he suggests, in case any such be discovered, the
propriety of amending the Constitution. Amend it for what? If, like
Mr. Jefferson, the President thought improvements expedient, but not
constitutional, it would be natural enough for him to recommend such an
amendment. But hear what he says in this very message:

"In view of these portentous consequences, I cannot but think that this
course of legislation should be arrested, even were there nothing to
forbid it in the fundamental laws of our Union."

For what, then, would he have the Constitution amended? With him it is a
proposition to remove one impediment merely to be met by others which,
in his opinion, cannot be removed, to enable Congress to do what, in his
opinion, they ought not to do if they could.

Here Mr. Meade of Virginia inquired if Mr. Lincoln understood the
President to be opposed, on grounds of expediency, to any and every
improvement.

Mr. Lincoln answered: In the very part of his message of which I am
speaking, I understand him as giving some vague expression in favor of
some possible objects of improvement; but in doing so I understand him
to be directly on the teeth of his own arguments in other parts of it.
Neither the President nor any one can possibly specify an improvement
which shall not be clearly liable to one or another of the objections he
has urged on the score of expediency. I have shown, and might show again,
that no work--no object--can be so general as to dispense its benefits
with precise equality; and this inequality is chief among the "portentous
consequences" for which he declares that improvements should be arrested.
No, sir. When the President intimates that something in the way of
improvements may properly be done by the General Government, he is
shrinking from the conclusions to which his own arguments would force him.
He feels that the improvements of this broad and goodly land are a mighty
interest; and he is unwilling to confess to the people, or perhaps
to himself, that he has built an argument which, when pressed to its
conclusions, entirely annihilates this interest.

I have already said that no one who is satisfied of the expediency of
making improvements needs be much uneasy in his conscience about its
constitutionality. I wish now to submit a few remarks on the general
proposition of amending the Constitution. As a general rule, I thi