The measure met, however, with more opposition than the Bank Bill or the Tariff Bill had experienced. Two years of peace had cooled the ardor of the national spirit somewhat, and the people were dropping back into the narrow spheres of ordinary life and business routine.
Moreover, the great hue and cry raised by the demagogues and the press over the bill, passed at the previous session, changing the pay of the members of Congress from a per diem of six dollars during attendance to an annual salary of fifteen hundred dollars, had made the members timid about the appropriation of money, and disinclined to obligate the Treasury to anything beyond absolutely necessary expenses.
| Passage of the Bill by Congress. |
Nevertheless, the great power and earnestness with which Mr. Calhoun addressed himself to the task of carrying the bill through its different stages were crowned with success. It finally passed both Houses, in a slightly modified form, during the last week of the Fourteenth Congress and of President Madison's second term.
| Veto of the Bill by the President. |
To the great surprise of the friends of the measure, the President returned the bill to Congress on March 3rd, with his objections. These were, summed up in a single sentence, that there was no warrant in the Constitution for the exercise of the power by Congress to pass such a bill. The President held that Congress could appropriate money only to such objects as were placed by the Constitution under the jurisdiction of the general Government. He, therefore, repudiated Calhoun's latitudinarian view that Congress was referred to its own discretion merely in the appropriation of money for the advancement of the general welfare. He acknowledged the desirability of attaining the object contemplated by the bill, and indicated that an amendment to the Constitution, expressly conferring upon Congress the power in question, was the proper way to deal with the subject. He had, as we have seen, recommended the consideration of the question of internal improvements in both of his annual messages to the Fourteenth Congress, and it was chiefly for this reason that the veto was so unexpected. It is true that, in both of these messages, he had expressed some doubt in regard to the power of Congress over the subject, but it was supposed that this was only his cautious way of approaching a new thing, and that he would certainly defer to the views of the Congressional majority.
It must be remembered, however, that Mr. Madison belonged to the first generation of the Republicans, and that the principle of the party, in the period of its origin, was strict construction of the Constitution in regard to the powers of the general Government. He had been driven by the younger men into the War, and into the national policies which it occasioned and produced, and it is at least intelligible that he returned to his earlier creed as the country settled down again into the humdrum of ordinary life.