During the session of Congress of 1856-57, Senator Toombs again arraigned the whole system of internal improvements. He carefully differentiated between building a lighthouse and clearing out a harbor by the Federal Government. He said in course of the debate: "Where lighthouses are necessary for the protection of your navy, I admit the power to make them; but it must be where they are necessary, and not merely for the benefit and facilitation of commerce. Foreign and domestic commerce ought to be charged, as in England and France, for the benefit they receive. I would make the shipowners, the common carriers of this country, who are constantly using the power of this government to make money out of the products of honest industry and agriculture, submit to this rule. "The power to found a navy is found in the only fountain of power in this country, the Constitution. The defense of one is the defense of all. The destruction of nationality is the destruction of the life of all. "I say if you take away the property of one man and give it to a thousand, or if you take away the property of a million and give it to nineteen millions, you do not create national wealth by transferring it from the pockets of honest industry to other people's pockets. This is my principle. It is immovable. The more commerce there is on the Mississippi the more they are able and competent to pay the expenses of transporting it, and I only ask that they shall do it." Mr. Toombs sustained the veto of President Pierce of the Mississippi River bill. In July, 1856, he said that he had for eleven years maintained the vetoes of Mr. Polk. "I have perceived that this mischief is widespread, this corruption greater, this tendency to the destruction of the country is more dangerous. The tendency to place the whole government under the money power of the nation is greater and greater. The danger may be all of my imagination; but whether that be so, or whether I see in a bolder light the evil that will grow by letting this sluice from the public treasury and making it run by the will of the majority, I deem it so important that it may be worth an empire. We are called on, upon the idea of everybody helping everybody's bill, to vote for them all. There certainly can be no greater abandonment of public principle than is here presented."