public life. The President is discussing the question, What shall we
do with the surplus?

"Shall we suppress the impost, and give that advantage to
foreign over domestic manufactures? On a few articles of
more general and necessary use, the suppression, in due
season, will doubtless be right; but the great mass of the
articles upon which impost is paid are foreign luxuries,
purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford
themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly
prefer its continuance, and application to the great
purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and
such other objects of public improvement as it may be
thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of
Federal powers. By these operations, new channels of
communication will be opened between the States, the lines
of separation will disappear, their interests will be
identified, and their union cemented by new and indissoluble
bonds."

Upon these hints, the young Senator delayed not to speak and act; nor
did he wait for an amendment to the Constitution. His first speech in
the Senate was in favor of building a bridge over the Potomac; one of
his first acts, to propose an appropriation of lands for a canal round
the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville; and soon he brought forward a
resolution directing the Secretary of the Treasury to report a system
of roads and canals for the consideration of Congress. The seed of the
President's Message had fallen into good ground.

Returning home at the end of the session, and reentering the Kentucky