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I would ask the Senator from Virginia whether he conceives that Congress has a right to appropriate the net proceeds of the sale of one section of land in a particular township for school purposes in that township? Or, in these words, suppose that, instead of giving the land for school purposes, as Congress has done, and as the Senator intimated yesterday Congress has a right to t do, we should sell the lands and put the money in the Treasury, and then there should be a proposition to appropriate the money back again to the same object. Suppose the section had been sold for $1,000; could you take $1,000 from the Treasury, and appropriate it back again to establish common schools there? I apprehend not. And why? Because you cannot pursue the land after it is converted into money. When you have converted it into money, you lose that control over it, which you have and may rightfully exercise so; long as it is land. This is so, because when you put it into the Treasury, as I remarked before, it becomes part and parcel of one common fund. There is no line which divides the land money from the money received from customs, or from any other source of revenue. It is not so, however, so long as it retains its distinctive character as land. The Senator from Virginia, yesterday, justified the granting of lands to railroad companies. While it seemed to be unfair towards some of the States, yet he thought it might be justified upon the ground, that by giving one section of land for a railroad, the alternate Section was improved in value.

Mr. HUNTER. If the Senator will allow me, I said nothing about giving lands to railroad companies.

Mr. BROWN. I understood the Senator to say that the grants which we had made heretofore for internal improvements --

Mr. HUNTER. I spoke of the grants of the school sections.

Mr. BROWN. I, perhaps, attributed the argument to the wrong quarter. I heard it from some source, and was about to reply to it. If it be the fact that the giving of the alternate sections to railroads makes the remaining sections worth twice as much as before, that does not affect the question of power -- as to whether you have the right to do it. That fact may furnish a very good reason why you should exercise a power already existing, but certainly it cannot confer a power which did not exist before. I would put the question of power to grant lands, as proposed in this bill, upon the same ground as the question of power to grant land to railroads. You derive it from that clause in the Constitution which gives you authority to dispose of the public lands. You get it there. The purpose for which you dispose of them does not and cannot, by any possibility, affect the question of power. If you do not have the power to appropriate the lands, no use to which you can apply them, however beneficial to yourselves or to others, can confer the power. The fact that one section of land is doubled in value by giving an adjoining section to insure the construction of a canal or railroad can only prove that such disposition of the land is wise or prudent. But it cannot confer a power not already existing under the Constitution. If you have no authority under the Constitution to grant land to railroads, you cannot assume it and justify the act solely on the ground that nothing is lost thereby to the Government, or that it may prove a speculation. If the advantages resulting to the Treasury is to furnish the rule that governs us in our use of the public lands or money, I know not why the Government should not become a stockholder in every profitable railroad or other successful scheme for speculation in the United States.

I hold this to be true, that Congress has no authority over the public money that can justify its use for any purpose other than the common benefit. The public -- general, I may say universal -- interests of the whole country must be subserved in the use of the public money. You have no authority to use it for local, partial, neighborhood purposes. Your authority over the public lands is less limited. With them, as I have said, you have endowed colleges, established common schools, cleaned out rivers, erected levees, constructed railroads, sold them for almost nothing, and given them to individuals without price. Could you thus have treated the public Treasury?

If Congress could endow more than twenty colleges by grants of public lands, I know of no reason why it may not endow a lunatic asylum. The same clause that authorized you to give Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Mississippi, Alabama, and other States lands for college purposes, will justify you in giving these and other States lands for the indigent insane. If, having the power, it was a wise and judicious use of it to give lands to the sane, how much more wise and humane must it be to give it to the insane?

I do not question the power. I think the bill proposes a wise, judicious, benevolent, and humane exercise of it; and if justice is done to my own, and all the other States, I know not why I may not vote for it.