A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 5, part 3: Franklin Pierce
History
A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 5, part 3: Franklin Pierce
Pierce, Franklin, 1804-1869; Presidents -- United States; United States -- History -- Sources; United States -- Politics and government
As property it is distinguished from actual money chiefly in this
respect, that its profitable management sometimes requires that portions
of it be appropriated to local objects in the States wherein it may
happen to lie, as would be done by any prudent proprietor to enhance the
sale value of his private domain. All such grants of land are in fact
a disposal of it for value received, but they afford no precedent or
constitutional reason for giving away the public lands. Still less do
they give sanction to appropriations for objects which have not been
intrusted to the Federal Government, and therefore belong exclusively
to the States.
To assume that the public lands are applicable to ordinary State
objects, whether of public structures, police, charity, or expenses of
State administration, would be to disregard to the amount of the value
of the public lands all the limitations of the Constitution and confound
to that extent all distinctions between the rights and powers of the
States and those of the United States; for if the public lands may be
applied to the support of the poor, whether sane or insane, if the
disposal of them and their proceeds be not subject to the ordinary
limitations of the Constitution, then Congress possesses unqualified
power to provide for expenditures in the States by means of the public
lands, even to the degree of defraying the salaries of governors,
judges, and all other expenses of the government and internal
administration within the several States.
The conclusion from the general survey of the whole subject is to
my mind irresistible, and closes the question both of right and of
expediency so far as regards the principle of the appropriation proposed
in this bill. Would not the admission of such power in Congress to
dispose of the public domain work the practical abrogation of some
of the most important provisions of the Constitution?
If the systematic reservation of a definite portion of the public lands
(the sixteenth sections) in the States for the purposes of education and
occasional grants for similar purposes be cited as contradicting these
conclusions, the answer as it appears to me is obvious and satisfactory.
Such reservations and grants, besides being a part of the conditions on
which the proprietary right of the United States is maintained, along
with the eminent domain of a particular State, and by which the public
land remains free from taxation in the State in which it lies as long
as it remains the property of the United States, are the acts of a mere
landowner disposing of a small share of his property in a way to augment
the value of the residue and in this mode to encourage the early
occupation of it by the industrious and intelligent pioneer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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