must submit." That measure of justice which you would mete out to me or my people, mete out to others and their people. That measure of justice which you would mete out to the South, mete out to the North, and then there will be no just ground of complaint anywhere. I ask you whether you are going to say to the Southern States, "if the legis lation be against you, you must abide by it until you can have overturned it in court;" and to the people of the Northern States, "if the legislation be against your prejudices or your principles, you have but to appeal to Congress, and Congress will set the matter right for you?"

Sir, I regard this as flagrantly unjust-as one of the most unjust propositions, all things considered, that has ever been brought before this body. It is not only yielding to a wild spirit which is threatening to overturn the institutions of the country, thereby encouraging that spirit to go on to still further aggression, but it is, in my judgment, a palpable, downright, outrageous disregard of the rights of one half of the Union.

There is but one point, in my judgment, upon which this proceeding can be justified; and that is the point taken by the Free-soil portion of this body. If they are right that this whole legislation is the work of usurpation and tyranny-if they are right in the supposition that persons thrust themselves into the territory and arbitrarily made laws under which they do not mean to live and under which they are not living, then it is your duty to interpose and wipe all the laws from the statute-book; not only those which are obnoxious, but those which would otherwise be acceptable, upon the broad ground that it was a usurpation and a tyranny. I hold that you have no right to discriminate. One senator rises and says, "this law is obnoxious to me," and forthwith the Senate blots it out. Another rises and says, "this is obnoxious to me," and you blot that out. And when you have blotted out enough to obtain a majority of the Senate, there you stop. There are still complaining senators, still senators, representatives from states, who say "there are other laws obnoxious." Why not listen to their complaints, and wipe out those laws also?

Sir, if I believed, with the senators on the other side of the chamber, that unauthorized persons had made these laws, and now refused to live under them, I should go with the senator from Massachusetts, not only for blotting out the obnoxious portion, but all the other, and giving a new start to the government; but I believe no such thing; I have seen no evidence of it. I believe that the legislature which made those laws was as fair a legislature as ever represented so new a people anywhere. That there were irregularities in the election is true beyond all doubt. These irregularities happen in old, and well-settled, and well-organized communities. Can you expect more regularity in a territory, situated as Kansas is, than in a state? It was the legislature of the territory. Some of its members doubtlessly were irregularly chosen, but it represented the people of Kansas, and it was their only representative. It passed these laws. The next election comes off in October-only a little more than a month from to-day. If the people of Kansas are not satisfied with these laws, let them repeal them, as a dissatisfied party in a state repeals their laws. What I maintain is, that you have no right to interfere. Under your grant to the territory, it had the same right to pass laws for itself which a state had to pass laws for itself. It has the same

right to pass laws for itself which Massachusetts, or Virginia, or any other state, has to pass laws to govern people within their own limits. I dare say the gentlemen on the other side of the chamber think there are many statutes on the Virginia statute-book that are outrageous; but would you call upon the Senate to wipe them out? Would you call upon Congress to interfere? Massachusetts complained of certain legislation of South Carolina, and the imprisonment of what she chose to call her colored citizens, but she never asked Congress to repeal the act of South Carolina. Why? Because South Carolina had a right to pass outrageous laws, if she chose to do so, and govern her people by them. Congress had no business to interpose.

Now, if the principle upon which you passed your Kansas bill was the correct principle, that the people had the right to pass such laws as they chose to pass, subject only to the limitations of the Constitution; and if it was true, as you said, that the limitations of the Constitution were to be determined by the courts, and not by Congress, under what pretence do you bring this bill here, and ask for action upon it? The people have legislated; you think they have legislated erroneously; but there is no appeal but to the court to overturn their legislation.

I do not care to pursue this subject. It opens a wide field for debate. It opens up all the principles on which the territories are governed. It involves all our ideas of the powers of government. I am not going to run off into this branch of the subject. I plant myself upon the contract which we entered into in passing the original Kansas bill. Sir, the people of the territory have no right to legislate for themselves, if you exercise a supervisory control to overturn their legislation whenever you are dissatisfied with it. My venerable friend from Michigan maintained this morning, as he has always maintained, that the people have a right -I understand him to say it is a sovereign right of the people-to make laws for themselves; but when they make the laws, and they do not meet the approbation of my friend from Michigan, he throws them overboard.

Mr. CASS. I never said that.

Mr. BROWN. But you act it.
Mr CASS. I never acted it.

Mr. BROWN. Does not my friend from Michigan admit that the people of Kansas have a right to pass laws for themselves?

Mr. CASS. I am not going to discuss this matter, as I am rather a point of attack to-day. I wish to observe, that I maintain, as I have always done, that the people of Kansas have certain inalienable rights secured by the Constitution. I maintain that, in a territory, American citizens have no right to institute a government of themselves, unless driven to it by your neglect. I maintain that, when you do institute a government, they may then go on and exercise governmental powers, which powers they do not derive from you, but from the Constitution. You give them the means to exercise them. That has been my doctrine. Now, Mr. President, I am not going to touch the point of the honorable senator from Mississippi, but merely to vindicate myself. I believe that the people of the territory of Kansas have the right to exercise their domestic privileges, if I may so term them, for themselves, and you have no right to interfere; but I believe that if the Congress of the United States pass a law, they have the same right to see that that law

is faithfully executed which they had to pass it. Whether you derive your power from one clause of the Constitution or another to establish a territorial government, you have the same right to take care that that government is faithfully executed. Then, if the territorial legislature pass laws which are in the very face of the Constitution and in the face of your organic act, it is my opinion that Congress has a right to correct their error.

Mr. BROWN. I so understood my friend. I do not think there is any difference at all between his understanding of himself and my understanding of his opinions. I am not quarrelling with him about it; but my own mind is so obtuse that it fails or refuses to perceive the difference between the position of my friend as stated by himself and as stated by me.

The people of the territory either have the right to make laws for themselves or they have not. If they have the right to do it, I maintain that you have no right to overturn their laws; because, if, whenever they run counter to your views, and make laws which you do not approve, you have the right to overturn them, that very right, it appears to me, involves the other right of making the laws for them in the beginning. If you have the right to say that their laws are either good or bad, according to your judgment, and to be maintained or not maintained, as you choose, it certainly embraces the inferior right of saying, in the beginning, what sort of laws they shall have. It would be a shorter way to tell them, in advance, "here are our notions of what laws you ought to have; take them and be content." I do not know what becomes of squatter sovereignty, popular sovereignty, and all that. When we act thus, it seems to me that all goes by the board.

INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS.

SPEECH IN THE SENATE, MAY 6, 1856, ON THE SUBJECT OF INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS BY THE GENERAL GOVERNMENT.

MR. PRESIDENT: It seems to me that we of the Democratic faith have gone sadly astray on this subject of internal improvements. We have either passed resolutions which we do not understand, or having passed them we deliberately trample them under foot. It is high time, I think, that we strike those resolutions from the book of our principles, or else resolve to adhere to them.. In 1848, when our venerable friend from Michigan was made the standard-bearer of the Democratic party, we resolved against a general system of internal improvements. The Whigs in my part of the country charged precisely what we have before us in the Senate to-day. They said, "You mean to have no general system of improvement, but you mean to have it in detail." When I was appealed to I said, with that frankness which I trust has always been and always will be a part of my character, "We contemplate no such thing; we are incapable of declaring against a general system which shall bear equally in its burdens upon all parts of the country, and which shall

dispense its blessings on all parts of the country, and then go for a special system of legislation which shall benefit one section at the expense of another."

I believed then, that my party was sincere on this question, and that, in declaring against a general system, it declared against the system in the aggregate and in detail. It seems, however, that I am to learn from the Senate now a different lesson. Individual members of the party-I do not say that it is the action of the party in the aggregate-individuals representing its interests and the interests of the country here, do support these measures of special legislation. I am free to say now, as I have said at home, that, if we are to have internal improvements at all by the general government, I am for a general system—a system which shall dispense its blessings alike on every section, and the burdens of which shall be borne equally by all parts of the Union. I am opposed to sectional legislation, to class legislation, to legislation for the benefit of particular neighborhoods, states, or sections of the confederacy.

Two years ago we passed a bill distributing about $5,000,000 of the public money among the several states for the improvement of rivers and harbors. We sent it to the President of the United States; and whatever other faults may be found with him, it stands, in my judgment, to his eternal credit that he vetoed that bill. Now, sir, what have we here? The items of that bill are taken up, one by one, and each is incorporated into a separate bill. That which he could not gulp down at one draught, he is expected to take by piecemeal. You do not propose to physic the President on the good old plan of the allopathists, but you approach him with your homeopathic doses, and you give them to him in infinitesimal parts, dividing them up as though you expected that, when he could not take the whole pill at once, he would take it at a thousand different swallows if it were divided. I do not know what he will do, but I know what he ought to do. When you send him the first of these infinitesimal parts, these homeopathic doses, he ought to treat it precisely as he did treat the whole dose, and throw it back upon you.

If we are to have these improvements made at all by the money of the federal government, I say again, let us have a system. When we declared as a great party against a general system of internal improvements, I understood that we were declaring against it in the aggregate; and as the major always includes the minor, when we declared against the greater evil, I supposed that we declared against all the little evils. which lay beneath it. As a member of the Democratic party, speaking what I conceived to be its interests, maintaining what I believed to be its principles, I repelled the imputation, that while we were opposed to a general system of internal improvements we were for doing the same thing in detail.

Sir, this must stop. You must either cease to pass these bills, or strike opposition to internal improvements from the platform of your party. This kind of cheatery and humbuggery on the country cannot be long tolerated. When you say that you cannot improve rivers and harbors that it is against the principles of the party to do so, and then take up a harbor in this state, and a river somewhere else, and go on scattering your improvements all over the Union, taxing one man's constituents for the benefit of another's, you cannot expect the people to believe that you are acting fairly. Such an idea may pass current here;

but when you get out before the straight-forward, the honest-hearted, the wool-hatted, and homespun-breeched farmers of the country, they will not understand it. They will say that there is an attempt among the politicians to cheat them on this question.

Mr. PUGH. Allow me to say to my friend that he will not find "rivers and harbors" in the platform.

Mr. BROWN. "Rivers and harbors" is not there, but "a system of internal improvements" is there; and in the name of all that is righteous and just, is not this a part of that system? Why, sir, I was talking to a friend the other day on the subject of the Pacific Railroad, and he undertook to prove its constitutionality to me in a new way. He asked me, "Do you not admit that we have the right to open a wagon-road if we find it necessary for military purposes?" After some hesitation, I admitted that it was possible we might do it. "Well," said he, "if you have a right to cut down trees for that purpose, have you not a right to smooth over the service of the ground?" I thought that was reasonable. "Then," said he, "if you can smooth the surface of the ground, can you not dig it down to a level where it is a little too high in one place, and pile it up where it is a little too low in another?" It seemed to be possible that we might do it. "Now," said he, "if you come to a swampy place, can you not lay a stick of wood across it and make a causeway, so that wagons can pass over it?" "Perhaps you can," I responded. "Then, if you can do that-if you can lay down sticks of wood in swampy places can you not lay them down in places which are not swampy; and if it be necessary, can you not put down the wood close together, two and a half feet or three feet apart, and when you get the timbers down, can you not lay iron rails across them, if that be necessary to keep them together; and when you get them down can you not run a wagon upon them, drawn by steam, just as well as a wagon drawn by horses?"

I found that he was making me admit myself clear out of court-that he was fixing down a Pacific Railroad on me, starting with a plain little wagon road for military purposes. Thus we commence in these matters. Some little scheme is started by which you improve a particular harbor, because there is a great deal of shipping there, and then you assimilate something else to that, and something else again to that. Thus you go on, deducing one conclusion from another, until you arrive at the point to which you have resolved that you would never go, violating all your principles.

Sir, we have got to sea upon this subject; we have broken our rudder; we have lost our compass; the pilot is overboard; and the ship is at the mercy of the winds and the waves. It is high time that we got to a harbor-one not made by men by appropriations from the treasury, but one made by God Almighty.

I trust that we shall have a test vote on this question. I know of no better occasion on which to have a direct, up-and-down, straight-out test vote, and see how we stand. The Democratic Convention is soon to assemble; and if we, as a party, do not mean to stand up against internal improvements by the money of the federal government, let us say so like men. I am opposed to these appropriations, and I have been from the beginning, and as an individual I expect to remain so; but I desire to know where I am to stand as a party man. I do not want to go home and be humbugging my constituents with the idea that my