So much, sir, I had to say concerning these school lands.

But the senator from Connecticut reminds you that the new States have received some 500,000 acres each of your lands under the distribution act. It is true, sir; and some of them much more. Indiana has received far more, So has Ohio. To Michigan has been assigned by the distribution act 500,000 acres, to which, sir, may be added 3,200* acres for public buildings, a few sections for salt springs, and also the 5 per cent. upon such sales as you may be pleased to make. (That 5 per cent. amounted, I think, during the last year, to about $1,000.) All this, and no more, may be fairly set down to the debit of Michigan. And now, sir, what, at your instance, have we given in exchange for what we have received?

Sir, how can I estimate the worth of all we have at your request given up? Can you measure the prosperity of a country by arithmetical rule? Can you thus affix a value upon the happiness of a people in dollars and cents? Of all the rights that appertain to a sovereign and independent State, I know of none more indisputable, nor more vitally impor tant, than that of uncovering and making useful the natural wealth of a country; of increasing its commerce, of facilitating the intercourse of its people, and of encouraging its agriculture, by the construction and establishment of roads, canals, and railways. Nor do I know of any political right that draws after it a correlative duty more imperative! To such ends all the resources of every sovereign power must be holden subservient; to such ends every species of property, and every subject of the government, through the sovereign power of taxation ought to be made to contribute in just proportion.

for means to reduce that debt. You had a large gal title would follow the use, and vest where the amount of wild lands in the old northwestern ter-use vests. But certainly the transfer could have ritory, which you wished to sell the better to en done no more than to create a new trustee-no more able you-in part-to pay that debt. But, more than to constitute of the State a trustee, instead of than this: you wanted to extend your empire-you the United States; but to the exclusive benefit always desired to carry your flag to the shores of the great of the "cestuy que use." lakes-you desired to plant it on the banks of the distant Mississippi. You had stipulated, also, and you desired to build up new States there-States that should do honor to those principles of well-regulated freedom, which your people had struggled so hard and through blood to establish. But, more than all, perhaps, you also wished to throw up a barrier against those ferocious savages of the northwest, who were wont, in congregated masses, to pounce upon you with so fearful, with so terrific power! Savages, whose incursions so often brought terror, and dismay, and agony into every heart of the old border States; and whose retreat, as many in your Keystone State still live to remember, was usually marked by one stream of fire and of blood! Sir, who could be persuaded to buy your land and settle in such a country? What inducement could you hold out sufficient to counterbalance the privations, the sufferings, the hazards of a situation so fearful? It is fit we should regard the condition of that country and of your border States at that time. It is fit that we should remember what you promised, why you promised, and what you did. I cannot go into detail; but I will say generally that, as early as 1785, you promised by your public acts that you would appropriate a large amount of these lands for the purposes of schools; that by the articles of compact contained in your ordinance of 1787, you agreed with all who would consent to move out and settle there, that they and their posterity should always be protected in the blessings of free republican institutions and government. You enumerated the great principles of a well-regulated civil liberty, and all their most effective safe-guards, and guarantied them to all such as, taking you at your word, might be persuaded to seek their homes there. And among other of your stipulations you promised to them that "schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged there." And when, a few years after, you laid the broad foundations of your land system, you remembered this your plighted faith. You published to the world your terms of sale. You pledged your faith to all who should buy land of you in any surveyed township, that one-36th part of it-viz: section No. 16-should forever afterwards be applied towards the support of schools. These were your published and authenticated "conditions of sale." With every purchaser of every eighty-acre lot, and his posterity after him, you entered into a solemn "covenant to stand seized" forever of that section No. 16 to the sole and only use indicated. This usufructory privilege and right in section 16 constituted a part of every contract of sale you ever entered into with every purchaser of every acre you have ever sold in any one of your surveyed townships there. It was a part of that for which every purchaser paid his money. And it was no more in your power to make any other disposition of that lot than it was to take from the purchaser the very patent he had obtained from you. It is true, you afterwards affected to transfer these school lands to the States; but what passed by that transfer? Nothing, sir, but the naked title only, subject al- *In the Land Office reports this land granted for "public ways to the use; and I am not prepared to admit buildings" is erroneously stated to be 13,200; 10,000 had the competency of your doing even that. Accord-been granted to build a new jail and court-house after the old ones were burned down in 1805, when the old town of ing to the principle of the old statute of uses, the le

These wise, just, and proper purposes, Michigan has sought to accomplish. How has the effort resulted? In the exhaustion, alas, of our means—in the prostration of our hopes-in the humiliating and total failure of the undertaking! And why this failure? Because more than three-fourths of the real estate of the whole country is withdrawn from the reach of the taxing power! Because more than threefourths of that property directly benefited by these roads and public works of the country is beyond the reach of a fair proportionate and compulsive contribution! The expense of the whole is thrown upon a fourth part, and that fourth part is staggering, sinking under the pressure! And thus it is, sir, that the most useful and legitimate of all the powers of government are chained up. Your interdict is upon us; and a general paralysis threatens to overspread our land!

It will be remembered, sir, that the point of the argument of the senator from Connecticut is, that the States of this Union are intended to be coequal in all things. No, sir, not in all things. One important exception to the general proposition must, I think for the moment, have escaped the vigilant recollection of the senator. It is I think forty-six years ago,

Detroit was totally consumed by fire.

separable from sovereignty, of taxing the lands that are within its limits for the beneficent purposes of government? What "original State" in this Union what nation or people on earth having sovereign powers, ever failed to exercise that right in its discretion over every species of property which was within its limits? And if we of Michigan do not possess it, where is that principle of equality among the States to which the senator so properly allud ed? If we do not possess it, nor an equivalent for it, what becomes of the promise exacted from you in our behalf by Virginia, as the condition of her grant→ that you would build up republican States in the territory she ceded to you, and that those States, when admitted into the Union, should possess and exercise all those rights of sovereignty, freedom, and independence which the original States possessed and exercised?

that you conveyed to the provident and wise State | take that from us also? Where, in that hallowed infrom which the senator comes some three or four strument, is to be found the clause which takes from millions of acres of land lying within the old north-a State its right of eminent domain its power, inwestern territory. This large tract of land she received, either in gross violation of that equality of the States, of which the senator speaks, or else, being waste, unseated crown lands, she claimed them as being within her original limits. She claimed them in virtue of that sovereign power which all the original States asserted; and which none of them having any such crown lands within their limits, failed successfully to assert. But your constitution, sir, while it sufficiently recognised the plenary power of the original States in this regard, contains, nevertheless, a provision inhibiting the exercise of that sovereign power on the part of the new States, which have grown up within the old northwestern territory, for to that effect you have always construed the third section of the fourth article of your constitution. And in that construction, I desire to say, as I have already said, the people of Michigan have always and cheerfully acquiesced. In so far, therefore, and But, sir, it was not your purpose to bring us especially because all the States, and the whole peo- into the Union in so mutilated and infirm a condiple of the United States have by their constitution tion. You looked with distrust, perhaps, to the so decreed, the new States of the northwestern action of young and inexperienced State legislators. territory cannot be permitted to possess all the same You feared, perhaps, that in the exercise of their rights of sovereignty the original States possessed. sovereign powers, they might tax your acres unIn that particular, they are not, and cannot be deem- justly or capriciously. You have always, therefore, ed to have been "admitted into the Union, on the same preferred to commute with the new States, and to footing with the original States, in all respects whatso- enter into compacts with them upon the footing of But in all things else in all things in which compensation, of equivalents. When, in 1836, you your constitution has not, in the clearest terms, de-offered us admission, but told us that we must not creed otherwise-I submit to you that the new afterwards tax your land, you at the same time told States which have grown up within the old north us "that the subject of the public lands, and the inwestern territory, when, respectively, they come to terests of the said State therein, shall be regulated be admitted into the Union, must be considered as en- by future action" between you and the State. We titled to demand that they should be so admitted, were no diplomatists, sir; we knew nothing of the "with all the same rights of sovereignty, freedom, and arts of diplomacy; but we thought you meant to independence as the other States;" for such is not only deal kindly, and as a parent, towards us; and that, the manifest tenor and principle of the constitution, in all fairness, you intended to grant to us somebut such, also, are the express terms of that deed of thing like an equivalent for that of which we were cession of Virginia from which you deduce your deprived. And when, in 1837, in your solemn legistitle. You took under that deed of cession; you lative act, you said that "the State of Michigan must hold per formam doni. If the wild and unap-shall be one, and is hereby declared to be one of the propriated lands within our limits, which you did not think proper to sell before you suffered us to emerge from our condition of colonial dependence upon you, were deemed too valuable a boon to be parted with, did we come into the Union shorn, also, of the sovereign right of taxation? Did your constitution

ever."

United States of America, and admitted into the Union on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever," we confidently believed that it was not your purpose to "palter with us in a double sense," and while you "kept the word of promise to the ear, to break it to the hope."

A grant of land for the relief and support of the indigent curable and incurable insane in the United States.

JUNE 27, 1848.

Referred to a Select Committee, and ordered to be printed, and that 5,000 additional copies be printed for the use of the Senate.

To the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States in Congress assembled.

Your memorialist respectfully asks permission to lay before you what seem to be just and urgent claims in behalf of a numerous and increasing class of sufferers in the United States. I refer to the great and inade quately relieved distresses of the insane throughout the country.

Upon the subject to which this memorial refers, many to whose justice and humanity it appeals are well-informed; but the attention of many has not been called to the subject, and a few, but a very few, have looked upon some features of this sad picture as revealed in private dwellings, in poorhouses, and in prisons.

Your memorialist hopes to place before you substantial reasons which shall engage your earnest attention, and secure favorable action upon the important subject she advocates.

It is a fact, not less certainly substantiated than it is deplorable, that insanity has increased in an advanced ratio with the fast increasing popu. lation in all the United States. For example, according to the best received methods of estimate five years since, it was thought correct to count one insane in every thousand inhabitants throughout the Union. At the present, my own careful investigations are sustained by the judgment and the information of the most intelligent superintendents of hospitals for the insane, in rendering the estimates not less than one insane person in every eight hundred inhabitants at large, throughout the United States.

There are, in proportion to numbers, more insane in cities than in large towns, and more insane in villages than among the same number of inhabitants dwelling in scattered settlements.

Wherever the intellect is most excited, and health lowest, there is an increase of insanity. This malady prevails most widely, and illustrates its presence most commonly in mania, in those countries whose citizens possess the largest civil and religious liberty; where, in effect, every indiTippin & Streeper, printers.

vidual, however obscure, is free to enter upon the race for the highest honors and most exalted stations; where the arena of competition is accessible to all who seek the distinctions which acquisition and possession of wealth assures, and the respect accorded to high literary and scholastic attainments. Statesmen, politicians, and merchants, are peculiarly liable to insanity. In the United States, therefore, we behold an illustration of my assertion. The kingdoms of Western Europe, excepting Portugal, Spain, and the lesser islands dependent on Great Britain, rank next to this country in the rapid development of insanity. Sir Andrew Halliday, in a letter to Lord Seymour, states that the number of the insane in England has become more than tripled in the last twenty years. Russia in Europe, Turkey, and Hungary, together with most of the Asiatic and African countries, exhibit but little insanity. The same is remarked by travellers, especially by Humboldt, of a large part of South America. Those tracts of North America inhabited by Indians, and the sections chiefly occupied by the negro race, produce comparatively very few examples. The colored population is more liable to attacks of insanity than the negro.

This terrible malady, the source of indescribable miseries, does increase, and must continue fearfully to increase, in this country, whose free, civil, and religious institutions create constantly various and multiplying sources of mental excitement. Comparatively but little care is given in cultivating the moral affections in proportion with the intellectual development of the people. Here, as in other countries, forcible examples may be cited to show the mischiefs which result alike from religious, social, civil, and rev

*NOTE. I wish to mark carefully the distinction between true religion and extravagant religious excitements. The one is the basis of every virtue, the source of every consolation under the manifold trials and af 'flictions which beset the path of every one in the course of this mortal pilgrimage; while that morbid state which is created by want of calm, earnest meditation, and self-discipline, by excessive demands upon the physical strength, by protracted attendance upon excited public assemblies, is ever to be deprecated. The following statistics show how large a part of the patients in some of our best hospitals labor under what is commonly termed religious insanity. I offer a pretty full list from the report, for 1843, of the Massachusetts State Hospital, for the sake of comparison number of years not recorded:

Many cases not recorded for two years previous to 1844.

1844.

Dr. Woodward remarks, that "the coincidence of this table with the

olutionary excitements. The Millerite delusions prepared large numbers for our hospitals; so also the great conflagrations in New York, the Irish

records of other institutions shows, conclusively, that if we have failed in ascertaining causes, we have fallen into a common error."

Seven consecutive and valuable reports by Dr. Kirkbride, exhibit the following results in the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. This is not, like the first referred to, a State institution, but has a class of patients from adjacent States, as well as its own State's insane. It will be kept in mind, also, that more than 350 insane patients are in the Blockley almshouse in the vicinity, of which no note is here made.

In 1841-42, admissions 299; of which 233 were residents of Pennsylvania, viz;

Men.

Wer

omen.

Total.

In 1842-43, of 439 cases, there were from religious excitement 12 men, 9 women-total 21. In 1843-'44, of 592 cases, religious excitement produced of men 17, of women 11-total 28. In 1844-45, in 769 cases, religious excitement in men 19, in women 16-total 35. In 1846, of 936 cases, of men were, through religious excitement, 22; of women, 20 total 42. In 1847, of 1,196 cases recorded, 26 men, 24 women-total 50, through religious excitement.

Dr. Brigham's first annual report upon the New York State Hospital shows, of 276 cases within the first year, there were through religious excitement, of men 29, of women 21-total 50; besides 5 men and 2 women (total 7) insane through "Millerism."

Of 408 patients in 1842, 57 became insane through ill health, 32 through intemperance, 54 through religious anxiety, 50 through trouble and disappointment, and 55 through various minor causes.

Of 179 cases received at Bloomingdale in 1842, 19 were from intemperance, 15 various causes, 15 puerperal, 14 religious excitement, 14 love, 13 trouble.

Of 122 cases received in 1842 at Staunton, Va., 33 were ill health, 20