Such issues as were discoverable in the presidential contest of 1824 were formulated in the debates in Congress during the early part of the year. As the country recovered from financial depression, the question of internal improvements again forged to the front. In 1822, a bill to authorize the collection of tolls on the Cumberland Road had been vetoed by the President. In an elaborate essay Monroe set forth his views on the constitutional aspects of a policy of internal improvements. Congress might appropriate money, he admitted, but it might not undertake the actual construction of national works nor assume jurisdiction over them. For the moment the drift toward a larger participation of the National Government in internal improvements was stayed. Two years later, however, Congress authorized the President to institute surveys for such roads and canals as he believed to be needed for commerce and military defense. The vote on this bill shows that the source of opposition to internal improvements was chiefly in the Northeast, in Virginia, and in the Carolinas. The West and Southwest, with Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey, were a unit in support of the general survey. No one pleaded more eloquently for a larger conception of the functions of the National Government than Clay. No one voiced the aspirations of his section more faithfully. He called the attention of his hearers to provisions made for coast surveys and lighthouses on the Atlantic seaboard and deplored the neglect of the great interior of the country. "A new world has come into being since the Constitution was adopted," he exclaimed. "Are the narrow, limited necessities of the old thirteen States, of, indeed, parts only of the old thirteen States as they existed at the formation of the present Constitution, forever to remain the rule of its interpretation?" Of the other presidential candidates, Jackson voted in the Senate for the general survey bill; and Adams left no doubt in the public mind that he did not reflect the narrow views of his section on this issue. Crawford felt the constitutional scruples which were everywhere being voiced in the South, and followed the old expedient of advocating a constitutional amendment to sanction national internal improvements.