Public Lands.
Senate, February 23, 1830.
Mr. WOODBURY. Not examining the particular kind of sales the government can make for the common benefit, such as grants to the new states for such schools, receiving virtual compensation therefor, by having the rest of the land freed from taxation, I merely lay down what I suppose to be the general principle.
On that principle, no reasoning has been offered which convinces me that lands can be legally appropriated to any object for which we might not legally appropriate money. The lands are as much the property of the Union as its money in the treasury. The cessions and purchases of them were as much for the benefit of all as the collection of the money. The Constitution, as well as common sense, seems to recognize no difference; and if the money can only be appropriated to specified objects, it follows that the land can only be so appropriated. Within those specified objects I have ever been, and ever shall be, as ready to give lands or money to the west as to the east; but beyond them, I never have been ready to give either to either. Towards certain enumerated objects. Congress have authority to devote the common funds—the land or the money; because those objects were supposed to be better managed under their control than under that of the states; but the care of the other objects is reserved to the states themselves, and can only be promoted by the common funds, in a return or division of these funds to proprietors, to be expended as they may deem judicious.
The whole debate on these points goes to satisfy my mind of the correctness of that construction of the Constitution, which holds no grants of money or lands valid, unless to advance some of the enumerated objects intrusted to Congress. When we once depart from that great landmark on the appropriation of lands or money, and wander into indefinite notions of "common good" or of the "general welfare," we are, in my opinion, at sea without compass or rudder; and in a government of acknowledged limitations, we put every thing at the caprice of a fluctuating majority here; pronouncing that to be for the general welfare to-day, which to-morrow may be denounced as a general curse. Were the government not limited, this broad discretion would, of course, be necessary and right But here every grant of power is defined. Many powers are not ceded to the general government, but are expressly withheld to the states and people; and right is, in my opinion, given to promote the "general welfare," by granting money or lands, but in the exercise of specific powers granted, and in the modes prescribed, by the Constitution.
In fine, if the government, and the principles of strict construction of the Constitution, cannot be prosperously administered, it requires no spirit of prophecy to foresee, that, in a few brief years, in a new crisis approaching, and before indicated, it must, as a confederation, probably cease to be administered at all. It will, in my judgment, become a government of usurped, alarming, undefined powers; and the sacred rights of the states will become overshadowed in total eclipse. When that catastrophe more nearly approaches, unless the great parties to the government shall arouse, and in some way interfere and rescue it from consolidation, it will follow as darkness does the day, that the government ends, like all republics of olden times, either in anarchy or despotism.
