ducation, roads,
rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may
be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of the federal
powers'; and he adds: 'I suppose an amendment to the Constitution, by
consent of the States, necessary, because the objects now recommended are
not among those enumerated in the Constitution, and to which it permits
the public moneys to be applied.' In 1825, he repeated in his published
letters the opinion that no such power has been conferred upon Congress."

I introduce this not to controvert just now the constitutional opinion,
but to show that, on the question of expediency, Mr. Jefferson's opinion
was against the present President; that this opinion of Mr. Jefferson,
in one branch at least, is in the hands of Mr. Polk like McFingal's
gun--"bears wide and kicks the owner over."

But to the constitutional question. In 1826 Chancellor Kent first
published his Commentaries on American law. He devoted a portion of one of
the lectures to the question of the authority of Congress to appropriate
public moneys for internal improvements. He mentions that the subject had
never been brought under judicial consideration, and proceeds to give a
brief summary of the discussion it had undergone between the legislative
and executive branches of the government. He shows that the legislative
branch had usually been for, and the executive against, the power, till
the period of Mr. J.Q. Adams's administration, at which point he considers
the executive influence as withdrawn from opposition, and added to the
support of the power. In 1844 the chancellor published a new edition of
his Commentaries, in which he adds some notes of what had transpired on
the question since 1826. I have not time to read the original text on
the notes; but the whole may be found on page 267, and the two or three
following pages, of the first volume of the edition of 1844. As to what
Chancellor Kent seems to consider the sum of the whole, I read from one of
the notes:

"Mr. Justice Story, in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United
States, Vol. II., pp. 429-440, and again pp. 519-538, has stated at
large the arguments for and against the proposition that Congress have a
constitutional authority to lay taxes and to apply the power to
regulate commerce as a means directly to encourage and protect domestic
manufactures; and without giving any opinion of his own on the contested
doctrine, he ha