But, while avoiding what seems superfluous discussion, I cannot forbear asking your attention to the amendment of the Senator from Kentucky [Mr. Underwood].
This amendment, when addressed to Senators of the favored States, is of a most plausible character. It proposes to give portions of the public domain to the original Thirteen, together with Vermont, Maine, Tennessee, and Kentucky, for purposes of education and internal improvement, at the rate of one acre to each inhabitant according to the recent census. This is commended by the declared objects,—education and internal improvement. Still further, in its discrimination of the old States, it assumes a guise well calculated to tempt them into its support. It holds out the attraction of seeming, though unsubstantial, self-interest. It offers a lure, a bait, to be unjust. I object to it on several grounds.
1. But I put in the fore-front, as my chief objection, its clear, indubitable, and radical injustice, written on its very face. The amendment confines its donations to the old States, and, so doing, makes an inequitable discrimination in their favor. It tacitly assumes, that, by the bill in question, or in some other way, the Land States have received their proper distributive portion, so as to lose all title to share with the old States in the proposed distribution. But, if there be any force in the argument, so much considered in this debate, that these railroad grants actually enhance the value of the neighboring lands of the United States, and constitute a proper mode of bringing them into the market, or if there be any force in the other argument which I have presented, drawn from the equitable claims of the Land States, in comparison with the other States, to the bounty of the great untaxed proprietor,[92] then this assumption is unfounded. There is no basis for the discrimination made by the amendment. If the Iowa Land Bill be proper without this amendment, as most will admit, then this amendment, introducing a new discrimination, is improper. Nor do I well see how any one prepared to sustain the original bill can sustain the amendment. The Senator from Kentucky, who leads us to expect his vote for the bill, seems to confess the injustice of his attempted addition.
2. I object to it as out of place. The amendment engrafts upon a special railroad grant to a single State a novel distribution of the national domain. Now there is a place and a time for all things; and nothing seems to me more important in legislation than to keep all things in their proper place, and to treat them at their proper time. The distribution of the public lands is worthy of attention; and I am ready to meet this great question whenever it arises legitimately for our consideration; but I object to considering it merely as a rider to the Iowa Land Bill.
The amendment would be less objectionable, if proposed as a rider to a general system of railroad grants,—as, for instance, to a bill embracing grants to all the Land States; but it is specially objectionable as a graft upon the present bill. The Senator who introduced it doubtless assumed that other bills, already introduced, would pass; but, if his amendment be founded on this assumption, it should wait the action of Congress on all these bills.
3. If adopted, the amendment might endanger, if it did not defeat, the Iowa Land Bill. This seems certain. Having this measure at heart, believing it founded in essential justice, I am unwilling to place it in this jeopardy.
4. It prepares the way for States of this Union to become landholders in other States, subject, of course, to the legislation of those States,—an expedient which, though not strictly objectionable on grounds of law, or under the Constitution, is not agreeable to our national policy. It should not be promoted without strong and special reasons. In the bill introduced by the Senator from Illinois [Mr. Shields], bestowing lands for the benefit of the insane in different States, this objection is partially obviated by providing that the States in which there are no public lands shall select their portion in the Territories of the United States, and not in other States. But, since in a short time these very Territories may become States, this objection is rather adjourned than removed.
5. Lands held under this amendment, though in the hands of States, will be liable to taxation, as lands of other non-resident proprietors, and on this account will be comparatively valueless. For this reason I said that the amendment held out the attraction of seeming, though unsubstantial, self-interest. That the lands will be liable to taxation cannot be doubted. The amendment does not propose in any way to relieve them from this burden, nor am I aware that they can be relieved from it. The existing immunity is only so long as they belong to the United States. Now there is reason to believe, that, from lack of agencies and other means familiar to the United States, the lands distributed by this amendment would not find as prompt a market as those still in the hands of the Great Landholder. But however this may be, it is entirely clear, from the recorded experience of the national domain, that these lands, if sold at the minimum price of the public lands, and only as rapidly as those of the United States, and if meanwhile they are subject to the same burdens as the lands of other non-residents, will, before the sales are closed, be eaten up by the taxes. The taxes will amount to more than the entire receipts from sales; and thus the grant, while unjust to the Land States, will be worthless to the old States, the pretended beneficiaries. In the Roman Law, an insolvent inheritance was known by an expressive phrase as damnosa hæreditas. A grant under this amendment would be damnosa donatio.
For such good and sufficient reasons, I am opposed to this amendment.