"If, then," Monroe continues, "the right to raise and appropriate the public money is not restricted to the expenditures under the other specific grants according to a strict construction of their powers, respectively, is there no limitation to it? Have Congress a right to raise and appropriate to any and to every purpose according to their will and pleasure? They certainly have not. The Government of the United States is a limited Government, instigated for great national purposes, and for those only. Other interests are committed to the States, whose duty it is to provide for them. Each government should look to the great and essential purposes for which it was instituted and confine itself to those purposes. A state government will rarely if ever apply money to national purposes without making it a charge to the nation. The people of the State would not permit it. Nor will Congress be apt to apply money in aid of the state administrations for purposes strictly local in which the nation at large has no interest, although the State should desire it. The people of the other States would condemn it. They would declare that Congress had no right to tax them for such a purpose, and dismiss at the next election such of their representatives as had voted for the measure, especially if it would be severely felt. I do not think that in offices of this kind there is much danger of the two governments mistaking their interests or their duties. I rather expect that they would soon have a clear and distinct understanding of them and move on in great harmony. Good reads and canals will promote many very important national purposes. They will facilitate the operations of war, the movements of troops, the transportation of cannon, of provisions, and every warlike store, much to our advantage and to the disadvantage of the enemy in time of war. Good roads will facilitate the transportation of the mail, and thereby promote the purposes of pure charity.27 ... In regard to the question whether the facts existing in any given case bring it within the description of that class of claims which Congress can and ought to recognize as founded upon equitable and moral considerations and grounded upon principles of right and justice, we think that generally such question must in its nature be one for Congress to decide for itself. Its decision recognizing such a claim and appropriating money for its payment can rarely, if ever, be the subject of review by the judicial branch of the Government."

The extent of the appropriating power of Congress is illus-trated in the case of United States v. Realty Co.,26 in which was upheld the power of Congress to appropriate money for the payment of certain claims which the Federal Government was not legally but only morally obligated to satisfy. The court said: "We are of opinion that the parties in these actions . . acquired claims upon the Government, of an equitable, moral or honorary nature . . . Congress has power to lay and collect taxes, etc., 'to pay the debts' of the United States. Having the power to raise money for that purpose, it of course follows that it has power when the money is raised to appropriate it to the same object . . . The term 'debts' includes those debts or claims which rest upon a merely equitable or honorary obliga-tionr and which would not be recoverable in a court of law if existing against an individual. . . . Payments to individuals, not of right or of a merely legal, claim, but payments in the nature of gratuity, yet having some feature of moral obligation to support them, have been made by the government by virtue of acts of Congress, appropriating the public money, ever since its foundation. Some of the acts were based upon considerations of commerce and political intelligence among the people. They will by being properly directed to these objects enhance the value of our vacant lands, a treasure of vast resource to the nation. To the appropriation of the public money to improvements having these objects in view and carried to a certain extent I" do not see any well-founded constitutional objection. . . . The right of appropriation is nothing more .than a right to apply the public money to this or to that purpose. It has no incidental power, nor does it draw after it any consequences of that kind. All that Congress could do under it in the case of internal improvements would be to appropriate the money necessary to make them. For every act requiring legislative sanction or support the state authority must be relied on. The condemnation of the land, if the proprietors should refuse to sell it, the establishment of turnpikes and tolls, and the protection of the work when finished must be done by the State. To these purposes the powers of the General Government are believed to be utterly incompetent. . . . The substance of what has been urged on this subject may be expressed in a few words. My idea is that Congress have an unlimited power to raise money, and that in its appropriation they have a discretionary power, restricted only by the duty to appropriate it to purposes of common defense and of general, not local, national, not state, benefit."

26 163 U. S. 427; 16 Sup. Ct. Rep. 1120: 41 L. ed. 215.