On the record
In those sixteen years the Government expended more than three hundred millions on the Navy!(4) It expended scarcely three millions to aid in building up its mercantile marine, and expended much of that unwisely.
Source
gutenberg.orgJames Blaine: “In those sixteen years the Government expended more than three hundred millions on the Navy!(4) It expended scarcely…”
Editor's note · Context
Blaine criticizes the government's spending priorities regarding the Navy versus the mercantile marine.
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More from James Blaine
If it be true that war cannot be declared, nor a system of general hostilities carried on by the Central Government against a State, then it seems to follow that an attempt to do so would be ipso facto an expulsion of such State from the…
All these provisions are made to protect the States, not to authorize an attack by one part of the country upon another; to preserve the peace, and not to plunge them into civil war.
Without the exercise of those functions which belong exclusively to the civil service, the laws cannot be executed in any event, no matter what may be the physical strength which the Government has at its command.
But this is a totally different thing from an offensive war to punish the people for the political misdeeds of their State Government, or to enforce an acknowledgment that the Government of the United States is supreme.
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