Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 1).djvu/219

Rh power to build roads and to keep them in repair. The power to “regulate commerce among the several states” had to his mind little meaning, if it did not imply “authority to foster” inter-state commerce, “to promote it, to bestow on it facilities similar to those which had been conceded to our foreign trade.” To him, this involved unquestionably the power to build canals. “All the powers of this government,” he argued, “should be interpreted in reference to its first, its best, its greatest object, the Union of these states. And is not that Union best invigorated by an intimate social and commercial connection between all the parts of the confederacy?” He described the unsatisfied needs of the great West in stirring terms, and then opened once more that glorious perspective of the great ocean-bound Republic which his ardent mind was so fond of contemplating. “Sir,” he exclaimed, “it is a subject of peculiar delight to me to look forward to the proud and happy period, distant as it may be, when circulation and association between the Atlantic and the Pacific and the Mexican Gulf shall be as free and perfect as they are at this moment in England, and in any other, the most highly improved country on the globe. Sir, a new world has come into being since the Constitution was adopted. Are the narrow, limited necessities of the old thirteen States, indeed of parts only of the old thirteen States as they existed at the formation of the Constitution, forever to remain a rule of its interpretation? Are we to for-