of strong government in that sense, but believed that it must have large powers in order to do the things which they thought it should do for the development of a great nation.
At the next session of Congress, in February, 1817, Calhoun took the lead in advocating a bill to set apart and pledge the bonus of the national bank and the share of the United States in its dividends, as a permanent fund for “constructing roads and canals and improving the navigation of water courses, in order to facilitate, promote, and give security to internal commerce among the several states, and to render more easy and less expensive the means and provisions for the common defense.” In his speech Calhoun pronounced himself strongly in favor of a latitudinarian construction of constitutional powers, and a liberal exercise of them for the purpose of binding the people of this vast country more closely together, and of preventing “the greatest of all calamities, next to the loss of liberty, and even that in its consequence — disunion.” Clay thanked him for “the able and luminous view which he had submitted to the committee of the whole,” and vigorously urged the setting apart of a fund to be used at a future time when the specific objects to be accomplished should have been more clearly ascertained and fixed. This contemplated the accumulation of funds in the Treasury with the expectation that suitable objects would be found for which to spend them, — a dangerous practice in a democratic gov-
