58 HAUPT— NATION AND THE WATERWAYS. [April 22, 



A few years later when the necessity of greater facilities became 

 still more manifest, his successor, President James Madison, also 

 urged that Congress should pass enabling legislation by amendment 

 to the Constitution and felt required under his oath of office to 

 veto a bill passed by Congress appropriating public money for works 

 of this class, in the following words : 



" March 3, 1817 : Having considered the bill this day presented to me 

 entitled ' An act to set apart and pledge certain funds for internal im- 

 provements, and for constructing roads, and canals and improving the 

 navigable water courses, in order to facilitate, promote and give security to 

 internal commerce among the several states, and to render more easy and 

 less expensive the means and provisions for the common defense,' I am 

 constrained by the insuperable difficulty I feel in reconciling the bill with 

 the Constitution of the United States to return it with that objection to the 

 House of Representatives, in which it originated. . . . 



" The power to ' regulate commerce among the several States ' cannot 

 include a power to construct roads and canals and to improve the navigation 

 of water courses in order to facilitate, promote and secure such a commerce, 

 without a latitude of construction departing from the ordinary import of the 

 terms strengthened by the known inconveniences which doubtless led to the 

 grant of this remedial power to Congress. . . . 



" If a general power to construct roads and canals and to improve the 

 navigation of watercourses, with the train of powers incident thereto, be not 

 possessed by Congress, the assent of the states to the mode provided in the 

 bill cannot confer that power. . . . 



" I am not unaware of the great importance of roads and canals and the 

 improved navigation of water courses, and that a power in the national 

 legislature to provide for them might be exercised with signal advantage 

 to the general prosperity. But seeing that such a power is not expressly 

 given by the Constitution, and believing that it cannot be deduced from 

 any part of it without an inadmissible latitude of construction and a reliance 

 on insufficient precedents ; believing also that the permanent success of the 

 Constitution depends on a definite partition of powers between the general 

 and the state governments, and that no adequate landmarks would be left 

 by the constructive extension of the powers of Congress as proposed in the 

 bill, I have no option but to withhold my signature from it, and to cherish 

 the hope that its beneficial objects may be attained by a resort for the neces- 

 sary powers to the same wisdom and virtue in the nation which established 

 the Constitution in its actual form and providently marked out in the instru- 

 ment itself a safe and practicable mode of improving it as experience might 

 suggest." 



As these Presidents were contemporaneous with the framing of 

 the Constitution their official interpretation of its powers and scope 



