5

efforts have been made by certain Northern Capitalist, Specu-
lators and Politicians acting in concert with the Representa-
tives of Railroads in Pennsylvania, to procure from Congress
authority for the making of a new road from Baltimore to
Washington. Various propositions have been offered with
that view, which have all hitherto failed, and the projectors
of the scheme, realizing the difficulities of their position
(chief among which is doubtless a very just apprehension
that Congress will not readily venture on the more than
doubtful power of constructing works of internal improve-
ment through a State without its sanction or assent) seek now,
as we have good reason to believe, to avail themselves of the
terms used in a charter already existing, and designed, as we
have seen for a very different purpose, to effectuate in that
way their cherished scheme; indeed among the Contractors
who have stipulated with the Baltimore and Potomac Company
to construct the road, may be found the names of some of the-
most conspicuous of those who have sought hitherto Congres-
sional authority for a new Washington road, and others in
the same interest are doubtless their coadjutors.

It will not, we presume, be denied by any of the parties to
this contract, that the making of a new road to the line of
the District of Columbia under the assumed authority of the
power given in the Potomac charter, to contruct " branches
and lateral roads," is the material, if not the sole object of the
Contract, and it is to prevent this abuse and perversion of the
terms of the Charter, that your Honorable Body is earnestly
solicted. under the power reserved by the State, to amend or
modify it, so as to interpose and prohibit the construction ef
the proposed Washington Branch.

The deep interest which the State possesses in the existing
Washington Rail Road and which, so long as the manage-
ment of that road meets as fully as it has heretofore done, all
the demands of trade; and travel, must challenge her support
of it to the exclusion of others, has been conspicuously mani-
fested on various occasions at this time ought certainly to be
not less influential than heretofore. The people of the State
have for many years endured patiently an onerous tax chiefly
imposed upon them by works of this character; such however
hits been the improvent of our financial 'condition within the
last few years that your predecessors would in all probability
have felt justified in abrogating the State tax entirely but for
the existence of a gigantic war, the exigencies of which could
not be well foreseen.

Now that the war is ended and our financial condition still
a subject of just congratulation, our tax payers will undoubt-
edly look with confidence to an early release from such bur-
dens; but if a corporation contributing as largely to the re-