MESSAGE PRESIDENT OF OF THE THE UNITED STATES. To the Senate and House of Representatives: In transmitting to you this, my fourth annual message, it is with thankfulness to the Giver of all good that, as a nation, we have been blessed for the past year with peace at home, peace abroad, and a general prosperity vouchsafed to but few peoples. With the exception of the recent devastating fire which swept from the earth with a breath, as it were, millions of accumulated wealth in the city of Boston, there has been no overshadowing calamity within the year to record. It is gratifying to note how, like their fellowcitizens of the city of Chicago, under similar circumstances a year earlier, the citizens of Boston are rallying under their misfortunes, and the prospect that their energy and perseverance will overcome all obstacles, and show the same prosperity soon that they would had no disaster befallen them. Otherwise we have been free from pestilence, war, and calamities, which often overtake nations; and, as far as human judgment can penetrate the future, no cause seems to exist to threaten our present peace. When Congress adjourned in June last a question had been raised by Great Britain, and was then pending, which for a time seriously imperiled the settlement by friendly arbitration of the grave differences between this Government and that of Her Britannic Majesty, which by the treaty of Washington had been referred to the tribunal of arbitration which had met at Geneva, in Switzerland. The arbitrators, however, disposed of the question which had jeoparded the whole of the treaty, and threatened to involve the two nations in most unhappy relations toward each other, in a manner entirely satisfactory to this Government, and in accordance with the views and the policy which it had maintained. The tribunal, which had convened at Geneva in December, concluded its laborious session on the 14th day of September last, on which day, having availed itself of the discretionary power given to it by the treaty to award a sum in gross, it made its decision, whereby it awarded the sum of fifteen millions five hundred thousand dollars in gold, as the indemnity to be paid by Great Britain to the United States for the satisfaction of all the claims referred to its consideration. |