Side by side with the bank bill went a proposition for an entirely new application of the government funds. Up to this time internal improvements--roads, canals and river and harbor improvements--had been made by the States, so far as they were made at all. Virginia and Maryland had spent considerable sums in an attempt to make the Potomac navigable, and a few canals had been constructed by private capital, sometimes aided by State credit. In 1806 the United States began the Cumberland Road, its first work of the kind; but it was intended to open up the public lands in Ohio and the country west, and was nominally paid for out of the proceeds of those public lands. Just as the embargo policy was taking effect, Gallatin, encouraged by the accumulation of a surplus in the Treasury, brought in a report, April 4, 1808, suggesting the construction of a great system of internal improvements: it was to include coastwise canals across the isthmuses of Cape Cod, New Jersey, upper Delaware and eastern North Carolina; roads were to be constructed from Maine to Georgia, and thence to New Orleans, and from Washington westward to Detroit and St. Louis. He estimated the cost at twenty millions, to be provided in ten annual instalments. Jefferson himself was so carried away with this prospect of public improvement that he recommended a constitutional amendment to authorize such expenditures. The whole scheme disappeared when the surplus vanished; but from year to year small appropriations were made for the Cumberland road, so that up to 1812 more than $200,000 had been expended upon it. [Sidenote: Calhoun's Bonus Bill.] [Sidenote: Madison's veto.]