observed in grants, an order founded in common sense, since it promotes a clear understanding of their import, is to grant the power intended to be conveyed in the most full and explicit manner, and then to explain or qualify it, if explanation or qualification should be necessary.  This order has, it is believed, been invariably observed in all the grants contained in the Constitution.  In the second because if the clause in question is not construed merely as an authority to appropriate the public money, it must be obvious that it conveys a power of indefinite and unlimited extent; that there would have been no use for the special powers to raise and support armies and a navy, to regulate commerce, to call forth the militia, or even to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises.  An unqualified power to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare, as the second part of this clause would be if considered as a distinct and separate grant, would extend to every object in which the public could be interested.  A power to provide for the common defense would give to Congress the command of the whole force and of all the resources of the Union; but a right to provide for the general welfare would go much further.  It would, in effect, break down all the barriers between the States and the General Government and consolidate the whole under the latter.

The powers specifically granted to Congress are what are called the enumerated powers, and are numbered in the order in which they stand, among which that contained in the first clause holds the first place in point of importance.  If the power created by the latter part of the clause is considered an original grant, unconnected with and independent of the first, as in that case it must be, then the first part is entirely done away, as are all the other grants in the Constitution, being completely absorbed in the transcendent power granted in the latter part; but if the clause be construed in the sense contended for, then every part has an important meaning and effect; not a line, a word, in it is superfluous.  A power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises subjects to the call of Congress every branch of the public revenue, internal and external, and the addition to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare gives the right of applying the money raised—­that is, of appropriating it to the purposes specified according to a proper construction of the terms.  Hence it follows that it is the first part of the clause only which gives a power which affects in any manner the power remaining to the States, as the power to raise money from the people, whether it be by taxes, duties, imposts, or excises, though concurrent in the States as to taxes and excises must necessarily do.  But the use or application of the money after it is raised is a power altogether of a different character.  It imposes no burden on the people, nor can it act on them in a sense to