Mr. Clay’s latest congressional efforts in behalf of internal improvements, were made on the sixteenth of January, 1824, when he made a speech before the house, on a bill authorizing the president to cause certain surveys and estimates of roads and canals to be made. Mr. Monroe and a strong party of supporters assumed the ground, that congress had no control over the post roads, other than to use such as had been established by the states individually, and that their construction and repair (and consequent alteration and closure) did not belong to the general government. To this doctrine Mr. Clay replied, by saying, ‘is it possible that this construction of the constitution can be correct――a construction which allows a law of the United States, enacted for the good of the whole, to be obstructed or defeated in its operations by a county court in any one of the twenty-four sovereignties? Suppose a state, no longer having occasion to use a post-road for its own separate and peculiar purposes, withdraws all care and attention from its preservation. Can the state be compelled to repair it? No! Then may not the general government repair this road, which is abandoned by the state power? And may it not protect and defend that which it has thus repaired, and which there is no longer an interest or inclination in the state to protect and defend? Is it contended that a road may exist in the statute book, which the state will not, and the general government cannot repair and improve? What sort of an account should we render to the people of the United States, of the execution of the high trust committed to us for their benefit, if we were to tell them, that we had failed to execute it because a state would not make a road for us? The same clause of the constitution which authorizes congress to establish post roads, authorizes it also to establish post offices. Will it be contended that congress, in the exercise of the power to establish post offices, can do no more than adopt or designate some preëxisting office, enacted and kept in repair by state authority? There is none such. It may then fix, build, create and repair offices of its own, and its power over the post roads, is by the constitution equally extensive.’ Mr. Barbour, of Virginia, was among the most vigorous assailants of the policy advocated by Mr. Clay. He contended, that if it were carried out, an encroachment on the rights of the states would be the inevitable consequence; that their jurisdiction would be abridged. He was answered in such a manner as to show that there was no ground of alarm to be apprehended from that source; that all the control which the general government sought to exercise, related simply to constructing and preserving the road, and the maintenance of the necessary measures of its defence, and that all illegal acts committed upon it would be left for adjudication by the state through which it passed. Mr. Clay contended that the general