The fourth claim is founded on the right of Congress to “pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare” of the United States.  This claim has less reason on its side than either of those which we have already examined.  The power of which this forms a part is expressed in the following words:  “Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises; to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts, and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”  That the second part of this grant gives a right to appropriate the public money, and nothing more, is evident from the following considerations:  First.  If the right of appropriation is not given by this clause, it is not given at all, there being no other grant in the Constitution which gives it directly or which has any bearing on the subject, even by implication, except the two following:  First, the prohibition, which is contained in the eleventh of the enumerated powers, not to appropriate money for the support of armies for a longer term than two years; and, second, the declaration of the sixth member or clause of the ninth section of the first article that no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law.  Second.  This part of the grant has none of the characteristics of a distinct and original power.  It is manifestly incidental to the great objects of the first part of the grant, which authorizes Congress to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, a power of vast extent, not granted by the Confederation, the grant of which formed one of the principal inducements to the adoption of this Constitution.  If both parts of the grant are taken together (as they must be, for the one follows immediately after the other in the same sentence), it seems to be impossible to give to the latter any other construction than that contended for.  Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises.  For what purpose?  To pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States, an arrangement and phraseology which clearly show that the latter part of the clause was intended to enumerate the purposes to which the money thus raised might be appropriated.  Third.  If this is not the real object and fair construction of the second part of this grant, it follows either that it has no import or operation whatever or one of much greater extent than the first part.  This presumption is evidently groundless in both instances.  In the first because no part of the Constitution can be considered useless; no sentence or clause in it without a meaning.  In the second because such a construction as made the second part of the clause an original grant, embracing the same object with the first, but with much greater power than it, would be in the highest degree absurd.  The order generally