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I do not desire to pursue this branch of the subject. My right being clear in my own judgment, to give the vote, my only purpose was to justify it in the judgment of others.

The next question is, whether it will be just not only towards my own State but towards all the States of the Union, to pass such a bill as this? In the outset I yield the claim which has been so often set up and insisted on that the old States have an interest in these lands; though I think they have sometimes made more fuss about it than there was any occasion for. I think I have heard the Senator from Virginia occasionally speak of the interest which his State has, in common with the other old States, in the public lands.

Now, when we propose to recognize the existence of this claim, and to some extent discharge it, the gentleman from Virginia comes in and opposes it. The distribution of the land provided for in this bill, is perhaps as near right as it can well be made.

Mr. BADGER. They cannot be perfectly right.

Mr. BROWN. As the Senator suggests, absolute right cannot be reached; no human ingenuity can devise a bill which would be absolutely and perfectly just towards all parties. There must be some little injustice somewhere; it is so in all our legislation; but this bill gives to the old States and to the new, an appropriation of public lands, and it divides them among them according to their population and territorial extent.

Now, sir, if we pass this bill, it will relieve the State of North Carolina, the State of Virginia, and all the other States from that which is a burden upon their own treasury and upon the purses of their people; for the insane must be taken care of, everywhere, in all civilized communities. Almost all of the States have made provision for this purpose, and those who have not, ought to do it, and doubtless will do it very soon; and how is this to be done but by levying taxes upon their people? Pass this bill, and you relieve them to some extent, from this taxation. I believe the State of North Carolina gets from 300,000 to 400,000 acres, and to that extent the bill creates a fund to relieve her people from taxation for the particular object specified in the bill. It will have the same effect in all the other States. To this extent, it is just to one State as it is just to the others. Its operations will be equal, or as near so as we can make them, with a single exception which I will point out.

There is in this bill a provision, which was introduced two or three mornings ago, and which caused me to hesitate as to whether I could vote for it. It was the amendment introduced by the Senator from California, excepting that State out of the general operations of the bill. It struck me at the time that it was hardly fair to give any one State of the Union an advantage over the others, by excepting her out of the general provisions of a law like this. That there are reasons now existing why California should be thus favored may be true, but those reasons must pass away after a few years. The amendment authorizes California to locate her land upon any unoccupied and unsurveyed territory within her limits. There are unsurveyed and unoccupied lands within the limits of other States -- Iowa, Wisconsin, Arkansas, and perhaps others. But these States have no right to appropriate them under this bill. They must take their land, and my State must take hers, from that which has been surveyed, offered for sale, and is now subject to entry at $1 25 per acre; and the same is true of all the States, save California alone, she being specially excepted out of the general provisions of the bill.

Every one who knows anything about the public lands, knows that there is a vast deal of difference between being confined to land subject to entry at private sale, and being allowed to go upon land which has never been brought into the market, and where you can get better land, and that of infinitely more value. I say I did not think this provision just at first, and I thought I would not vote for the bill upon that ground; but upon reflection, as it does not affect the interest of my State, and as I have the opportunity of saying that, in giving my vote, I do not mean to approve of the principle involved in the amendment, I will still vote for the bill. It does not interpose an insuperable barrier, it gives an undue advantage to California, but it works no special injury to Mississippi. My State gets the same with this provision in the bill as if it was out, and she gets it in the same way; and being able, in this form, to put upon the record that, in giving my vote, I do not desire to be understood as approving any principle which draws a distinction between the States of the Union, I can still vote for the bill.

If California cannot get her lands this year or next year, she will be able to get them much before she is as old as the youngest of her sisters -- long before she will be a State as old as Mississippi. In a few years she will be enabled to realize the benefits of this bill in precisely the same way that Mississippi and other States realize them now. Still I do not interpose this as an insuperable barrier to my vote. Without detaining the Senate further, I have only to say, in conclusion, that having given to the bill all the reflection which my time and opportunities have allowed me, I feel prepared to vote for it.