The first of these grants is in the following words:  “Congress shall have power to establish post-offices and post-roads.”  What is the just import of these words and the extent of the grant?  The word “establish” is the ruling term; “post-offices and post-roads” are the subjects on which it acts.  The question therefore is, What power is granted by that word?  The sense in which words are commonly used is that in which they are to be understood in all transactions between public bodies and individuals.  The intention of the parties is to prevail, and there is no better way of ascertaining it than by giving to the terms used their ordinary import.  If we were to ask any number of our most enlightened citizens, who had no connection with public affairs and whose minds were unprejudiced, what was the import of the word “establish” and the extent of the grant which it controls, we do not think there would be any difference of opinion among them.  We are satisfied that all of them would answer that a power was thereby given to Congress to fix on the towns, court-houses, and other places throughout our Union at which there should be post-offices, the routes by which the mails should be carried from one post-office to another, so as to diffuse intelligence as extensively and to make the institution as useful as possible, to fix the postage to be paid on every letter and packet thus carried, to support the establishment, and to protect the post-office and mails from robbery by punishing those who should commit the offense.  The idea of a right to lay off the roads of the United States on a general scale of improvement, to take the soil from the proprietor by force, to establish turnpikes and tolls, and to punish offenders in the manner stated above would never occur to any such person.  The use of the existing road by the stage, mail carrier, or postboy in passing over it as others do is all that would be thought of, the jurisdiction and soil remaining to the State, with a right in the State or those authorized by its legislature to change the road at pleasure.

The intention of the parties is supported by other proof, which ought to place it beyond all doubt.  In the former act of Government, the Confederation, we find a grant for the same purpose expressed in the following words:  “The United States in Congress assembled shall have the sole and exclusive right and power of establishing and regulating post-offices from one State to another throughout all the United States, and exacting such postage on the papers passing through the same as may be requisite to defray the expenses of the said office.”  The term “establish” was likewise the ruling one in that instrument, and was evidently intended and understood to give a power simply and solely to fix where there should be post-offices.  By transferring this term from the Confederation into the Constitution it was doubtless intended that it should be understood in the same sense in the latter that it was in the