Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 138]

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History University of Illinois

money or public lands for the benefit of the people in the various states. After the president's message had been delivered Morrill moved that it be printed and then in a brief but forceful address asked the reconsideration of the bill. He declared that the veto of a bill introduced without regard to party lines and carried on its own merits through both houses, "pressed by petitions and Resolutions from the Legislatures of at least thirteen States, and by an indefinite number of memorials from private citizens" had been a serious blunder if not a crime. He then took up the reasons for the veto as they appeared in the message and answered them one by one. He evidenced his belief that the president's action had been impelled by political considerations, sarcastically suggesting that the financial objection came "with ill grace from a Magistrate who has wasted more than ten million dollars in a grand march of the army to Utah, who is wasting a larger sum by the grander naval demonstration against Paraguay, and who would waste $30,000,000 more in the grandest of all propositions —the snatching of Cuba." He pointed out that there was no probability that the national treasury would suffer during the current year since it would require at least a year or two for the states to pass the legislation necessary to take advantage of the land grant. He asserted that there was nothing in the principle of federal aid to industrial education in each of the states that was more likely to cause a request for unwarranted favors from the central government than might be found in the idea of national support to state deaf and dumb hospitals to which "James Buchanan" and other prominent democrats gave their hearty support twenty years earlier. He showed that Jackson had vetoed a land bill in 1833 because it had given twelve and a half per cent more land to the new states than to the old, but declared that "this bill does equal and exact justice to all the States according to the census of 1850; and it further provides, that if, by the increase of population, the new States, or any States, shall have an increased representation in Congress in 1860, they shall receive twenty thousand acres for each additional Representative they may then be entitled to. I therefore contend that there is a discrimination rather for the benefit, than the injury, of the new