208.-View of Pittsburgh and the Ohio River below the city at the height of the water-travel period and before the coming of the railway. making roads leading to the state; the residue to be appropriated, by the Legislature of the State, for the encouragement of learning. By the terms of this law, a road leading to Illinois through Indiana could not come under the supervision of the Indiana legislature, but was placed "under the direction of Congress." This feature of the act, when considered in connection with the Indiana law of 1816, may indicate the existence of a distinction, at that time, between the interstate highway in process of creation and other roads local in character. Again was there no reference to the consent of such states as might be traversed by the roads which Congress announced would be built by the government toward Illinois. In 1820 Missouri's entrance to the Union was authorized,' and the familiar Section 6 of Article III in her case read: "Five per cent. . . . shall be reserved for making public roads and canals, of which three-fifths shall be applied to those objects within the State, under the direction of the Legislature thereof; and the other two-fifths in defraying, under the direction of Congress, the expenses. to be incurred in making a road or roads, canal or canals, leading to the said State." Two months afterward the national lawmakers made provision for surveying the route to be followed by the Cumberland Road in its future extension from Wheeling to the Mississippi River. By the year 1817 the thoroughfare was in use to Wheeling, and from 1802 until the date named fourteen governmental acts had been placed on the statute books in connection with its creation, after being formulated by ten Congresses and signed by three Presidents during five Presidential terms. We see in these events, then, the birth, establishment and maintenance of a continuous Federal policy having 1 The date of the Act was March 6, and it contained the same chance to accept or reject the road proposition. By Act of May 15, 1820. for its object the building of a transportation route by public funds for the general welfare. At the inception. of the plan, in 1802, the government seemingly took for granted the consent of some states to its operations within their limits and received their consent, meanwhile offering to a new state the chance to reject the large Federal power implied. After that time, during an interval of twenty years, the general government no longer directly requested state consent for its traffic-route enterprises but, as occasion arose, gave territories the choice that has been defined. The later acts of the series were weightier than the earlier ones in their suggestion of Federal power, since neither in providing for roads leading to Illinois, nor in allotting governmental funds for a road or roads. to Missouri, was Illinois or its legislature mentioned. Two other features contained in this series of laws call for attention. They indicate that Congress thought of the possibility of building more than one road if it so chose, and they show that the government did not consider itself limited to turnpikes as the only constituent parts of the Federal transportation system, but that it believed itself able to create other kinds of traffic routes, such as canals, if it saw fit to do so. By the year 1820 the government was apparently established in a position. - based on public opinion and approved as indicated by the action of the people's legislative representatives and executives that would have permitted it, without the alteration of its policy or of any other element in the situation, to build railways just as it was already building an interstate roadway or just as it proposed to build canals if it so decided. Then befell an action by President Monroe the first effect of which was to precipitate a violent political and economic controversy over the government's attitude toward interstate transportation facilities, and whose ultimate result was a reversal of the established Federal policy regarding that subject and an abandonment of the National Road as a national undertaking. On May 4, 1822, he vetoed an act "for the preservation and repair of the Cumberland Road," saying that he did so “under a conviction that Congress do not possess the power, under the Constitution, to pass such a law." His message. went on to say: "A power to establish turnpikes, with gates and tolls, and to enforce the collection of tolls by penalties, implies a power to adopt and execute a complete system of internal improvements. A right to legislate for one of these purposes is a right to legislate for the others. It is a complete right of jurisdiction and sovereignty for all the purposes of internal improvement, and not merely the right of applying money under the power vested in Congress to make appropriations (under which power, with the consent of the States through which the road passes, the work was originally commenced, and has been so far executed). I am of opinion that Congress do not possess this power. . . It is not likely that the President, when here speaking of the work "so far executed," referred to the manual labor then in progress as an outcome of the governmental mandates. He was discussing national prerogatives and policy. But if he did have in mind that phase of the undertaking when he said the work so far executed had been done "with the consent of the states through which the road passes," it is only needful to remember that, for the two years preceding, part of the human labor involved on the roadway had been performed in the jurisdictions of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, in connection with surveying and laying out the thoroughfare. That work was being done under the direction of Congress, at the expense of the national treasury. When Monroe made his statement concerning the relationship of the states to the work so |