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[Governor's Message]

confidence that when viewed in relation to our position in the Union, it will merit and receive all proper consideration.

I feel it my duty to call your attention to sundry resolutions of the Legislature of the State of Maryland, relative to the appropriation of public lands for the purposes of education, which resolutions were laid before the last Legislature of this State. By the several Acts of Congress, authorizing new States to be formed out of the territories of the United States, one thirty sixth part of each State so formed, has been appropriated for the support of common schools, and an additional quantity for seminaries of a higher grade. The vacant lands in each territory being the property of the United States, it follows that such appropriations have been made out of the common interest for the benefit of individual States. To this there can be no just reason of complaint, provided a corresponding benefit results to the original States.

But when it is recollected that this common fund was acquired by conquest in the Revolution, or by purchase since, and that too, before the new States, which are now reaping its benefit, were in existence as such; that the price whether of blood or treasure, was paid by the States that effected the Revolution, the reason for this appropriation for the benefit of the new States exclusively, seems wholly to fail. The policy of granting a due proportion of vacant lands for the purposes of education is unquestionably correct. A diffusion of knowledge being highly important for the stability of any government, so necessarily dependent as is ours upon public opinion, no friend of a republican form of Government could doubt the propriety of its encouragement by all proper means. The proposition from the State of Maryland is by an application to Congress, to procure an appropriation of a corresponding proportion of the public lands to each of the States, which which such an appropriation has not already been made. – In furtherance of this application, so just and equitable in its nature, in which we are equally interested with Maryland, the