the Constitution.  The United States is a great landed proprietor, and from the very nature of this relation it is both the right and the duty of Congress as their trustee to manage these lands as any other prudent proprietor would manage them for his own best advantage.  Now no consideration could be presented of a stronger character to induce the American people to brave the difficulties and hardships of frontier life and to settle upon these lands and to purchase them at a fair price than to give to them and to their children an assurance of the means of education.  If any prudent individual had held these lands, he could not have adopted a wiser course to bring them into market and enhance their value than to give a portion of them for purposes of education.  As a mere speculation he would pursue this course.  No person will contend that donations of land to all the States of the Union for the erection of colleges within the limits of each can be embraced by this principle.  It can not be pretended that an agricultural college in New York or Virginia would aid the settlement or facilitate the sale of public lands in Minnesota or California.  This can not possibly be embraced within the authority which a prudent proprietor of land would exercise over his own possessions.  I purposely avoid any attempt to define what portions of land may be granted, and for what purposes, to improve the value and promote the settlement and sale of the remainder without violating the Constitution.  In this case I adopt the rule that “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

JAMES BUCHANAN.

PROCLAMATION.

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

A PROCLAMATION.

Whereas an extraordinary occasion has occurred rendering it necessary and proper that the Senate of the United States shall be convened to receive and act upon such communications as have been or may be made to it on the part of the Executive: 

Now, therefore, I, James Buchanan, President of the United States, do issue this my proclamation, declaring that an extraordinary occasion requires the Senate of the United States to convene for the transaction of business at the Capitol, in the city of Washington, on the 4th day of next month, at 12 o’clock at noon of that day, of which all who shall then be entitled to act as members of that body are hereby required to take notice.

[SEAL.]

Given under my hand and the seal of the United States, at Washington, this 26th day of February, A.D. 1859, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-third.

JAMES BUCHANAN.

By the President: 
  LEWIS CASS,
    Secretary of State.

SPECIAL MESSAGE.

WASHINGTON, March 9, 1859.

To the Senate of the United States: 

It has become my sad duty to announce to the Senate the death of Aaron V. Brown, late Postmaster-General, at his residence in this city on yesterday morning at twenty minutes past 9 o’clock.