The Land Distribution Bill. This is emphatically a high toned Whig measure, which had been once crushed by General Jackson’s message of December, 1833. Mr. Clay, its illustrious author, was the very essence, the life and soul of Whiggery. It proposes to distribute the proceeds of the public lands among the several States. It proposes to surrender to the several States that immense and bountiful fund provided by our ancestors, which is always our surest resource, in times of war and danger, when our revenue from imports fails. In the days of Jackson, Van Buren and Polk, the Democratic doctrine was,—I fear it is not so at present,—to preserve this fund in the common Treasury, as a sacred trust, to enable Congress to execute the enumerated powers conferred upon them by the Constitution, for the equal benefit of all the States and the people. Should Congress give away the public lands to the States, they will deprive themselves of the power of bestowing land bounties upon the soldiers and the sailors who fight the battles of your country, and of granting liberal terms of purchase to those hardy pioneers who make the wilderness to bloom and to blossom as the rose. What will become of this policy if you distribute the proceeds of these lands among the States? Then every State will have a direct interest in preventing any donations of the public lands, either to old soldiers or actual settlers; because every acre thus given will so much lessen the dividend to each of the States interested. Should this Distribution Bill ever prevail, it will make the States mere dependencies upon the central Government for a large portion of their revenue, and thus reduce these proud Democratic sovereignties to the degrading position of looking to the Treasury of the United States for their means of support. In the language of General Jackson, “a more direct road to consolidation cannot be devised.” Such a state of dependence, though exactly in accordance with the centralizing Whig policy, has ever been abhorred by the Democrats. But the Distribution Bill is one of the principles, one of the “convictions,” of General Scott; and so let it pass.