We have been partakers of that improvement and owe for it a
sacred debt, not only of gratitude, but of equal or proportional
exertion in the same common cause. Of the cost of these undertakings, if
the mere expenditures of outfit, equipment, and completion of the
expeditions were to be considered the only charges, it would be unworthy
of a great and generous nation to take a second thought. One hundred
expeditions of circumnavigation like those of Cook and La Perouse would
not burden the exchequer of the nation fitting them out so much as the
ways and means of defraying a single campaign in war. But if we take
into the account the lives of those benefactors of mankind of which
their services in the cause of their species were the purchase, how
shall the cost of those heroic enterprises be estimated, and what
compensation can be made to them or to their countries for them? Is it
not by bearing them in affectionate remembrance? Is it not still more by
imitating their example--by enabling countrymen of our own to pursue the
same career and to hazard their lives in the same cause?
In inviting the attention of Congress to the subject of internal
improvements upon a view thus enlarged it is not my design to recommend
the equipment of an expedition for circumnavigating the globe for
purposes of scientific research and inquiry.
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