Good roads and canals will promote many very important national purposes.  They will facilitate the operations of war, the movements of troops, the transportation of cannon, of provisions, and every warlike store, much to our advantage and to the disadvantage of the enemy in time of war.  Good roads will facilitate the transportation of the mail, and thereby promote the purposes of commerce and political intelligence among the people.  They will by being properly directed to these objects enhance the value of our vacant lands, a treasure of vast resource to the nation.  To the appropriation of the public money to improvements having these objects in view and carried to a certain extent I do not see any well-founded constitutional objection.

In regard to our foreign concerns, provided they are managed with integrity and ability, great liberality is allowable in the application of the public money.  In the management of these concerns no State interests can be affected, no State rights violated.  The complete and exclusive control over them is vested in Congress.  The power to form treaties of alliance and commerce with foreign powers, to regulate by law our commerce with them, to determine on peace or war, to raise armies and a navy, to call forth the militia and direct their operations belongs to the General Government.  These great powers, embracing the whole scope of our foreign relations, being granted, on what principle can it be said that the minor are withheld?  Are not the latter clearly and evidently comprised in the former?  Nations are sometimes called upon to perform to each other acts of humanity and kindness, of which we see so many illustrious examples between individuals in private life.  Great calamities make appeals to the benevolence of mankind which ought not to be resisted.  Good offices in such emergencies exalt the character of the party rendering them.  By exciting grateful feelings they soften the intercourse between nations and tend to prevent war.  Surely if the United States have a right to make war they have a right to prevent it.  How was it possible to grant to Congress a power for such minor purposes other than in general terms, comprising it within the scope and policy of that which conveyed it for the greater?

The right of appropriation is nothing more than a right to apply the public money to this or that purpose.  It has no incidental power, nor does it draw after it any consequences of that kind.  All that Congress could do under it in the case of internal improvements would be to appropriate the money necessary to make them.  For every act requiring legislative sanction or support the State authority must be relied on.  The condemnation of the land, if the proprietors should refuse to sell it, the establishment of turnpikes and tolls, and the protection of the work when finished must be done by the State.  To these purposes the powers of the General Government are believed to be utterly incompetent.