of the past administration. So much for the kind of relief proposed to individuals.

2. It next proposes to relieve the States, by giving them three millions in distribution from the lands, and taking back from them, on this account, from three to four millions, by increased taxation and a higher tariff. This is contained in the Secretary's supplemental report, and strongly in the President's message, as one of the measures by which the country may once more return "to a state of prosperity." Yes, the States receiving this three millions, not from an existing surplus, but to be supplied, in fact, by new taxes, under an increased tariff, are to find in it a return to a state of prosperity; because they will be forced to pay back to the General Government, in additional duties, not only all they received, pay back with one hand what they received in the other,- -but pay back near a million more, to cover the expenses and losses of collecting and distributing it. Unfortunately, too, the President, though commendably disclaiming the constitutional power to assume State debts, or pay for them out of the revenue from duties, justifies this distribution of the public lands, as virtually within the object of the original cession of them from the States.

In haste or inadvertence, he overlooks the fact, that immense quantities of these lands were never ceded by the States, but purchased by us of foreign nations, and paid for out of the duties; because the net receipts from all the lands since 1789 are not yet equal to the expenditures connected with them by eight or ten millions of dollars. He forgets, then, that, in distributing the proceeds of sales in Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana and Florida,-more than half the present proceeds, we are virtually distributing the proceeds of the duties paid for them, and to this extent assuming State debts. I can but entreat the indebted States themselves also to see if they are to get by this three millions such means of extinguishing their debts as the President had hastily supposed.

Let the indebted States look to the operation of this mode of relief. One million, out of the three, must go to the States which are not in debt; of the two millions distributed to the indebted States, one million will be absorbed in new works, repairs of old works, &c., and one million will be left for the payment of interest one-twelfth of the whole amount of the annual interest due from the States. What sort of relief is this? They must, in this condition, resort to their own retrenchment, industry, and resources, their own prudence and energies, if the three millions are given, or never get their financial wagon out of the mire. They may call on Jupiter till doomsday; and if they insist on permitting Gettysburg tapeworm roads to help straight ones elsewhere, to begin a dozen new and unimportant canals to assist forward one useful work, and thus never complete any of them, and if they are constantly looking to others for loans, donations, and charitable alms, as relief, they will remain dis

tressed much longer than the commencement of this and the other numerous relief measures of this relief administration.

Another new project for their relief, proposed by the Secretary, was to pay the States the fourth instalment under the deposite act of 1836. To pay the States? We owe them nothing. We deposited with them twenty-eight millions, to be returned when called for; and the Secretary, instead of calling for the return of the money, when the exigencies of the country require it, proposes to give them nine millions more. Was there any surplus from which this sum was to be taken? No. The money must be obtained by increased taxation, or a large burthensome debt. What relief was there, then, in this operation? We take nine millions from the treasury, and, to replace it, with the expenses of collection, &c., we must draw ten millions, or more, from the pockets of the people, by duties or other taxes.

The only true means of relief are industry, frugality, and economy, not wild schemes of distribution. The former distribution or deposite scheme, by which the States got twenty-eight millions, was the greatest curse that ever befell them, as it led them into all kinds of extravagances and follies; the effects of which would, in some degree, be felt for ages.

And, if the value of State stocks be raised in the end, after infinite distress, it will not be for the benefit of the States, whose agents have sold some of them at thirty and forty per cent. sacrifice, but to the benefit, or relief and profit, of the nabob speculators on both sides of the Atlantic, who have already bought them at a discount almost equal to the old soldiers' certificates.

Coupled with this kind of relief to the States, is the further operation of the other project of relief to them, in respect to their currency, through the new Fiscal National Bank, of thirty or fifty millions of capital, which will rob their State institutions of most of the specie they have left; break most of the sound banks now in operation, where it can, as it did in the west and south-west, from 1819 to 1824; strip them of their legitimate business and profits; reduce prices, as it did then, ten or twenty per cent. more, and bring to the hammer and to ruin half the property left of those in any way indebted. To disregard this, is to let all historical warning be lost, and the lessons of wisdom taught in our own annals be no more useful than an old almanac.

But, beyond and over all this in peril to the States, by asking and receiving such relief from the General Government as donations, instalments, and largesses of all kinds, is the radical and fatal change thus introduced in their relations to that government. They are, by such a relief, to be made dependants on the General Government, instead of living, as now, independent. They are to become slaves instead of masters,-to creep and cringe, and bow here, to obtain their yearly supplies; and thus, for a mess of pottage, for which they, in another way, are made to pay more than the value, must submit to be

stripped of all their relative power, control, and sovereignty. In shunning Charybdis, you are wrecked on Scylla.

You could remedy a single loss of a few thousands, or even millions, of money, as the hair cut off will grow again. But when you introduce a new principle into the system, erroneous, poisonous, pestilential, how is it to be resisted by the very party overcome and prostrated by its corrupting influences? How can you easily rouse once more, in the willing slave, all the proud feelings and aspirations of the free? How can the lofty twenty-six sovereignties that compose this Union, after once succumbing and truckling to the General Government, and demeaning themselves to receive bread and alms at its hands, how can they ever regain their pristine supremacy, and control the encroachments and usurpations of the great central consolidated power, to which they have bent the knee of dependence and homage?

A great central consolidated power, thus wielding both the purse and the sword, and thus armed with its fiscal agent, and capital enough at its disposal to bribe half a continent, is, to be sure, to lord it here, over abject States; but time only can show whether it is not to be controlled and to move itself, by the slightest nod of those merchant kings, or monied monarchs, on whichever side of the Atlantic, whose influences to raise the prices of their State stocks can make palatable measures so fatal to the liberties and independence of the whole country.

So much for the relief to the States.

The measures proposed in this report are lastly advocated on account of the relief they are likely to bring to the General Government, pretended to be involved in debt and wasteful expenditure, though it has paid every due promptly and in specie, and is in so high credit as to be sought for as a guarantee by others. It is to relieve this government by stripping it of three millions of its present revenues; by adding many millions to its expenses; by creating a large and permanent national debt of twenty to forty millions; by virtually giving nine millions more, in the fourth instalment, to the States; and by repealing, in the sub-treasury, the great barrier against the use of non-specie-paying banks, and depreciated, irredeemable bank paper, to destroy our credit, and cause public as well as private losses to an incalculable amount.

This is the relief to the General Government.

I, for one, say, as respects my individual State, or United States relations, I ask no such political nostrums,- no relief, except in the old-fashioned mode of greater frugality in expenses, greater aversion to and freedom from debt, greater industry, temperance, and morality in society; and much less do I ask for any of the kinds of relief which this extraordinary report and its extraordinary recommendations would bring to us.

And if the brave Granite Republic, whose interests I have the honor to represent in part here, should deem it inexpedient, unconsti

tutional, or dangerous to public liberty, to approve these measures,and should refuse to accept of beggarly and insulting alms, which she never asked for, and which are to be wrung from the hard earnings of her own people, and by increased taxes on their own comforts, if not necessaries of life,-let me tell you, sir, that she will not be cajoled nor dragooned into acquiescence, by being told, as she is, in one clause of the Secretary's reformed bank charter, that you will still force from her this tributary tax, and bestow the proceeds on others, more supple and menial.

STATE OF THE NATIONAL TREASURY.*

It would seem, sir, from the pause in this debate, that the motion to print is about to be put. But, as the objection to it was first offered by me, with a view to expose some of the numerous errors with which the report abounds, and as the senator from Maine has replied to a portion of my remarks, it might be supposed that I acquiesced in the sufficiency of his explanations, if I did not now express a contrary opinion.

I hasten, therefore, to say, sir, that his explanations are not satisfactory, either as to details or general principles. They do not attempt to answer my exposition of several of the most glaring mistakes in the report; and, in almost every instance where any attempt is made, it fails entirely, or plunges the Secretary into a new difficulty. One cause of the embarrassment of the senator, as to details, arises from their inherent irreconcilable character, and another from the hasty and inadvertent manner in which many of them have been presented by the Secretary, whether in the report or in the fiscal portion of the message. Hence, taking the explanations given, still the whole discrepancies and contradictions, as respects the figures, are only changed to new amounts, but not entirely removed in a solitary case.

In truth, there is no way possible to reconcile many of the variations, and it might be as prudent for him, first as last, to admit them to be clearly inexplicable.

In the next place, as to the great general conclusions in the report concerning deficits and debt, there is no easy mode of removing the whole doubt about their true amount, because the Secretary has

* A speech in reply to Mr. Evans, on the motion to print an extra number of the Report of the Secretary of the Treasury; delivered in the United States Senate, June 18, 1841.

mingled and confounded several items, which should have been kept perfectly apart.

I am not surprised, therefore, that the learned senator, with all his experience on a financial committee, has met with no better success in bringing light out of darkness, or groping a way out of the labyrinth.

Thus, for one instance: the Secretary, in order to give an inflated appearance to the aggregate of appropriations not spent on the 4th of March last, and of the expenditures likely to happen under them during 1841, has first jumbled together what should have been, and usually is, stated separately, the appropriations and expenditures for the current service, and those for treasury notes. Thus, at the start, he probably deceived and misled even himself, in respect to the exaggerated amount of some of his results.

If he had kept them distinct, as is customary, most palpably there would not have been so much trouble in ascertaining their amount, their urgency, and the necessity there was for the call of an extra session of Congress. What we wanted to know was, whether, if the expenditures were confined to existing appropriations, there would be a deficit in the treasury; and whether we were called together, at this inconvenient season of the year, and at so much expense to the States and the Union, to supply a deficiency occasioned by the old administration, or to be occasioned by adopting the recommendations of the new one. The Secretary does not say, as any business man would say, in a similar situation in private life, "I owe so much; and I want to spend, in addition, so much." If he had done so, he would have found that his estimates of expenditures, under the old or existing appropriations, were too high, by five millions of dollars.

He proposes to expend twenty-three millions, whereas the appropriations by Congress, for the service of the year, were but about eighteen millions. Now, he (Mr. W.) would assert, without fear of contradiction, that a reference to the records of the department would show scarcely a single instance, for the last twenty-six years, where the expenditures of the year exceeded by one million of dollars the amount of new and permanent appropriations by Congress for that year. And yet the Secretary proposes to expend, during the present year, near five millions of dollars more than the appropriations already made by Congress for the whole year.

Mr. Woodbury then quoted, from an official document, the appropriations and expenditures for a number of years back, which showed that in every year except 1839 (which was about one million the other way) the expenditures were considerably less than the new and permanent appropriations; and said that it was the invariable practice of the department, formerly, to take the amount of the new and permanent appropriations as their estimate of the amount of expenditures for the year. He ventured to assert that, from Hamilton to Gallatin, and from Gallatin to Duane, this would be found to have been the practice; and yet the present Secretary has, at one bound, estimated his