Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 4.djvu/375

1808. be established from Maine to Georgia along the coast. To carry out these schemes Congress was to pledge two million dollars of the annual surplus for ten years in advance; and the twenty millions thus spent might be partly or wholly replaced by selling to private corporations the canals and turnpikes as they should become productive; or the public money might at the outset be loaned to private corporations for purposes of construction.

A national university was intended to crown a scheme so extensive in its scope that no European monarch, except perhaps the Czar, could have equalled its scale. Jefferson cherished it as his legacy to the nation,—the tangible result of his "visionary" statesmanship. Five years afterward he still spoke of it as "the fondest wish of his heart," and declared that "so enviable a state in prospect for our country induced me to temporize and to bear with national wrongs which under no other prospect ought ever to have been unresented or unresisted." Even in the close presence of bankruptcy or war he could not lay aside his hopes, or abstain from pressing his plan upon the attention of Congress at the moment when the last chance of its success had vanished.

The contrast between the President's sanguine visions and the reality was made the more striking by Gallatin's Annual Report, sent to Congress a few days later. The President spoke for the Administration that was passing away, while Gallatin