The whole meaning of this paragraph was explained by other documents. March 2, 1807, the Senate adopted a Resolution calling upon the President for a plan of internal improvements. April 4, 1808, Gallatin made an elaborate Report, which sketched a great scheme of public works. Canals were to be cut through Cape Cod, New Jersey, Delaware, and from Norfolk to Albemarle Sound,--thus creating an internal water-way nearly the whole length of the coast. Four great Eastern rivers--the Susquehanna, Potomac, James, and Santee, or Savannah--were to be opened to navigation from tide-water to the highest practicable points, and thence to be connected by roads with four corresponding Western rivers,--the Alleghany, Monongahela, Kanawha, and Tennessee,--wherever permanent navigation could be depended upon. Other canals were to connect Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario with the Hudson River; to pass round Niagara and the falls of the Ohio; and to connect other important points. A turnpike road was to be established from Maine to Georgia along the coast. To carry out these schemes Congress was to pledge two million dollars of the annual surplus for ten years in advance; and the twenty millions thus spent might be partly or wholly replaced by selling to private corporations the canals and turnpikes as they should become productive; or the public money might at the outset be loaned to private corporations for purposes of construction. A national university was intended to crown a scheme so extensive in its scope that no European monarch, except perhaps the Czar, could have equalled its scale. Jefferson cherished it as his legacy to the nation,--the tangible result of his “visionary” statesmanship. Five years afterward he still spoke of it as “the fondest wish of his heart,” and declared that “so enviable a state in prospect for our country induced me to temporize and to bear with national wrongs which under no other prospect ought ever to have been unresented or unresisted.”[316] Even in the close presence of bankruptcy or war he could not lay aside his hopes, or abstain from pressing his plan upon the attention of Congress at the moment when the last chance of its success had vanished. The contrast between the President’s sanguine visions and the reality was made the more striking by Gallatin’s Annual Report, sent to Congress a few days later. The President spoke for the Administration that was passing away, while Gallatin represented the Administration to come. That the secretary leaned toward war was notorious, and that he was Madison’s chief adviser, perhaps to be the head of his Cabinet, was known or suspected by the men who stood nearest to the Secretary of State, and who studied Gallatin’s Report as though it were Madison’s first Annual Message. The more carefully it was studied, the more distinctly it took the character of a War Budget.