to the professional qualifications which, from his being appointed to the office, he may be assumed to possess, would serve to give him great advantages. The published correspondence of the eminent statesmen of the first and second generations of our constitutional history, the reports of legal adjudications, the printed opinions of this office, and the documents on file in it, show that it was the received practice of the Attorney General not only to give opinions in private cases, and argue private causes at the seat of government, but also to attend, as a practicing barrister, at the sittings of courts in the States.

The office of Attorney General of the United States has been filled, in past times, by men, who, while eminent in their special profession, have been not less eminent in the career of parliamentary, diplomatic, administrative, or judicial distinction; and many of whom now live, enjoying, by just title, the respect and the confidence of their countrymen. At the bar of the Supreme Court they did honor to their station; and their official opinions are the law which guides the action of the government. Nothing could be more foreign to my purpose than to reflect, in what follows, upon any of those distinguished persons for pursuing a course in office which was not forbidden, but, on the contrary, invited by law, and was justified by official usage, and by the approbation or acquiescence of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison.

Heretofore, the custom of the Attorney General in this respect did not essentially interfere with his proper official duties, nor prejudicially affect his general relation to the government.

Within the last few years, however, the condition of the country has undergone changes, occasioning a vast augmentation in the amount of administrative business, which heads of department are called upon to perform; and it would not be possible now, as it has been heretofore, for the Attorney General, compatibly with performing well the duties of his office, to be frequently absent from the seat of government, attending to private professional pursuits, nor could he find much leisure to prepare and argue private causes even before the Supreme Court.

It may deserve consideration, whether Congress, in establishing quite recently a common rate of salary for the Attorney General and the other heads of departments, did not have in mind the new state of facts above referred to, and for that cause intend to repeal, by implication, the previous implication of law which prompted a continuance of the private professional pursuits of the Attorney General.

There is one other pertinent consideration. Most of the ordinary doctrines of law, and much of what is political organization, we have derived from the institutions of our mother country. The original theory of the office of Attorney General of the United States, which authorized and prompted him to engage in private professional practice, flowed, perhaps unconsciously, in part from the correspondent usage in Great Britain. But there the Attorney General is not a member of the cabinet, the Lord Chancellor performing the political duties which devolve upon the Attorney General here. And there is reason to doubt whether, at the present day, in the United States, it is expedient that a head of department should, under any circumstances, continue in the practice of law as a profession. Whatever change in the amount of

public business the present greatness and wealth of the country may have produced, they have produced a still greater change in the multitude and the urgency of the private interests which assail the government. No person who has been conversant with public affairs here for the last twenty years can fail, on comparing the state of things at the beginning and the end of that period, to see how striking is the transition in this respect. Formerly, in an age of simpler manners, when the public expenditures were less, the number of places less, the population of the country less, the frequentation of the capital less, the ingenuity of self interests less, at such a time a secretary, eminent in the legal profession, might, without possibility of reproach or suspicion of evil, take charge of private suits or interests at the seat of government. He may do so now, perhaps; but that is not so clear as it formerly was; and it is not easy to perceive any distinction in this between what befits one or another head of department. Nay, arguments of objection could be suggested, specially applicable in the existing state of society to the Attorney General.

However all these things may be, the actual incumbent of this office, in the magnitude and complication of the public interests with which it is now charged, experiences that its necessary duties are quite sufficient to task to the utmost all the faculties of one man; and he willingly regards those recent acts of Congress, which have at length placed the salary of his office on equal footing with other public offices of the same class as intimation at least that the government has the same precise claim on his services, in time and degree, as on those of the Secretary of State or the Secretary of the Treasury. As the corollary of that principle, he now proposes such modifications in the office as may render it really and effectually, as well as in theory, responsible for the law business of the government.

The same thing in substance was earnestly proposed by Jackson in his first annual message to Congress, (December 8, 1829,) and has been twice recommended to Congress by later Presidents. Whatever reasons of public utility seemed then to require change in this respect, have, in the progress of time, acquired such additional force as to lead me to conviction of the propriety of presenting the subject to your notice, and with your approbation to the notice of Congress.

I have the honor to be, very respectfully, your obedient servant, C. CUSHING.

1st Session.

No. 56.

MESSAGE

FROM

THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES,

RETURNING

To the Senate the bill entitled "An act making a grant of public lands to the several States for the benefit of indigent insane persons," with a statement of the objections which have required him to withhold from it his approval.

MAY 3, 1854.-Read, ordered to lie on the table, and be printed.

MAY 4, 1854.-Ordered that 10,000 additional copies be printed for the use of the Senate.

To the Senate of the United States:

The bill, entitled "An act making a grant of public lands to the several States for the benefit of indigent insane persons," which was presented to me on the 27th ultimo, has been maturely considered, and is returned to the Senate, the house in which it originated, with a statement of the objections which have required me to withhold from it my approval.

In the performance of this duty, prescribed by the Constitution, I have been compelled to resist the deep sympathies of my own heart in favor of the humane purpose sought to be accomplished, and to overcome the reluctance with which I dissent from the conclusions of the two houses of Congress, and present my own opinions in opposition to the action of a co-ordinate branch of the government which possesses so fully my confidence and respect.

If, in presenting my objections to this bill, I should say more than strictly belongs to the measure, or is required for the discharge of my official obligation, let it be attributed to a sincere desire to justify my act before those whose good opinion I so highly value, and to that earnestness which springs from my deliberate conviction that a strict adherence to the terms and purposes of the federal compact offers the best, if not the only, security for the preservation of our blessed inheritance of representative liberty.

The bill provides in substance:

First. That ten millions of acres of land be granted to the several States, to be apportioned among them in the compound ratio of the geographical area and representation of said States in the House of Representatives.

Second. That wherever there are public lands in a State, subject to sale at the regular price of private entry, the proportion of said ten millions of acres falling to such State shall be selected from such lands

within it; and that to the States in which there are no such public lands, land scrip shall be issued to the amount of their distributive shares, respectively, said scrip not to be entered by said States, but to be sold by them, and subject to entry by their assignees: Provided, That none of it shall be sold at less than one dollar per acre, under penalty of forfeiture of the same to the United States.

Third. That the expenses of the management and superintendence of said lands, and of the moneys received therefrom, shall be paid by the States to which they may belong, out of the treasury of said States.

Fourth. That the gross proceeds of the sales of such lands or land scrip, so granted, shall be invested by the several States in safe stocks, to constitute a perpetual fund, the principal of which shall remain forever undiminished, and the interest to be appropriated to the maintenance of the indigent insane within the several States.

Fifth. That annual returns of lands or scrip sold shall be made by the States to the Secretary of the Interior, and the whole grant be subject to certain conditions and limitations prescribed in the bill, to be assented to by legislative acts of said States.

This bill, therefore, proposes that the federal government shall make provision, to the amount of the value of ten millions of acres of land, for an elemosynary object within the several States, to be administered by the political authority of the same; and it presents at the threshold the question whether any such act on the part of the federal government is warranted and sanctioned by the Constitution, the provisions and principles of which are to be protected and sustained as a first and paramount duty.

It cannot be questioned, that if Congress have power to make provision for the indigent insane without the limits of this District, it has the same power to provide for the indigent who are not insane, and thus to transfer to the federal government the charge of all the poor in all the States. It has the same power to provide hospitals and other local establishments for the care and cure of every species of human infirmity, and thus to assume all that duty, of either public philanthropy or public necessity, to the dependent. the orphan, the sick, or the needy, which is now discharged by the States themselves, or by corporate institutions, or private endowments, existing under the legislation of the States. The whole field of public beneficence is thrown open to the care and culture of the federal government. Generous impulses no longer encounter the limitations and control of our imperious fundamental law. For, however worthy may be the present object in itself, it is only one of a class. It is not exclusively worthy of benevolent regard. Whatever considerations dictate sympathy for this particular object, apply in like manner, if not in the same degree, to idiocy, to physical disease, to extreme destitution. If Congress may and ought to provide for any one of these objects, it may and ought to provide for them all. And if it be done in this case, what answer shall be given when Congress shall be called upon, as it doubtless will be, to pursue a similar course of legislation in the others? It will obviously be vain to reply that the object is worthy, but that the application has taken a wrong direction. The power will have been deliberately assumed, the general obligation will, by this act, have been acknowledged, and the

question of means and expediency will alone be left for consideration. The decision upon the principle in any one case determines it for the whole class. The question presented, therefore, clearly is upon the constitutionality and propriety of the federal government assuming to enter into a novel and vast field of legislation, namely that of providing for the care and support of all those, among the people of the United States, who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public philanthrophy.

Í readily, and, I trust, feelingly acknowledged the duty incumbent on us all, as men and citizens, and as among the highest and holiest of our duties, to provide for those who, in the mysterious order of Providence, are subject to want, and to disease of body or mind; but I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the federal government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. To do so would, in my judgment, be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution, and subversive of the whole theory upon which the union of these States is founded. And if it were admissible to contemplate the exercise of this power for any object whatever, I cannot avoid the belief that it would in the end be prejudicial, rather than beneficial, in the noble offices of charity to have the charge of them transferred from the States to the federal government. Are we not too prone to forget that the federal Union is the creature of the States, not they of the federal Union? We were the inhabitants of colonies, distinct in local government one from the other, before the revolution. By that revolution, the colonies each became an independent State. They achieved that independence, and secured its recognition by the agency of a consulting body, which, from being an assembly of the ministers of distinct sovereignties, instructed to agree to no form of government which did not leave the domestic concerns of each State to itself, was appropriately denominated a Congress. When having tried the experiment of the confederation, they resolved to change that for the present federal Union, and thus to confer on the federal government more ample authority, they scrupulously measured such of the functions of their cherished sovereignty as they chose to delegate to the general government. With this aim, and to this end, the fathers of the republic framed the Constitution, in and by which the independent and sovereign States united themselves for certain specified objects and purposes, and for those only, leaving all powers not therein set forth as conferred on one or another of the three great departments-the legislative, the executive, and the judicialindubitably with the States. And when the people of the several States had, in their State conventions, and thus alone, given effect and force to the Constitution, not content that any doubt should in future arise as to the scope and character of this act, they engrafted thereon the explicit declaration that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people," can it be controverted that the great mass of the business of government, that involved in the social relations the internal arrangements of the body politic, the mental and moral culture of men, the development of local resources of wealth, the punishment of crimes in general, the preser