ing tonnage
duties; but I suppose one of its principles must be to lay a duty for the
improvement of any particular harbor upon the tonnage coming into that
harbor; to do otherwise--to collect money in one harbor, to be expended
on improvements in another--would be an extremely aggravated form of that
inequality which the President so much deprecates. If I be right in this,
how could we make any entirely new improvement by means of tonnage duties?
How make a road, a canal, or clear a greatly obstructed river? The idea
that we could involves the same absurdity as the Irish bull about the new
boots. "I shall niver git 'em on," says Patrick, "till I wear 'em a day
or two, and stretch 'em a little." We shall never make a canal by tonnage
duties until it shall already have been made awhile, so the tonnage can
get into it.

After all, the President concludes that possibly there may be some great
objects of improvement which cannot be effected by tonnage duties, and
which it 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,