With these improvements, and such others as zealous watchfulness and mature consideration may suggest, there can be little doubt that under an energetic administration of its affairs the Navy may soon be made everything that the nation wishes it to be.  Its efficiency in the suppression of piracy in the West India seas, and wherever its squadrons have been employed in securing the interests of the country, will appear from the report of the Secretary, to which I refer you for other interesting details.  Among these I would bespeak the attention of Congress for the views presented in relation to the inequality between the Army and Navy as to the pay of officers.  No such inequality should prevail between these brave defenders of their country, and where it does exist it is submitted to Congress whether it ought not to be rectified.

The report of the Postmaster General is referred to as exhibiting a highly satisfactory administration of that Department.  Abuses have been reformed, increased expedition in the transportation of the mail secured, and its revenue much improved.  In a political point of view this Department is chiefly important as affording the means of diffusing knowledge.  It is to the body politic what the veins and arteries are to the natural—­conveying rapidly and regularly to the remotest parts of the system correct information of the operations of the Government, and bringing back to it the wishes and feelings of the people.  Through its agency we have secured to ourselves the full enjoyment of the blessings of a free press.

In this general survey of our affairs a subject of high importance presents itself in the present organization of the judiciary.  An uniform operation of the Federal Government in the different States is certainly desirable, and existing as they do in the Union on the basis of perfect equality, each State has a right to expect that the benefits conferred on the citizens of others should be extended to hers.  The judicial system of the United States exists in all its efficiency in only fifteen members of the Union; to three others the circuit courts, which constitute an important part of that system, have been imperfectly extended, and to the remaining six altogether denied.  The effect has been to withhold from the inhabitants of the latter the advantages afforded (by the Supreme Court) to their fellow-citizens in other States in the whole extent of the criminal and much of the civil authority of the Federal judiciary.  That this state of things ought to be remedied, if it can be done consistently with the public welfare, is not to be doubted.  Neither is it to be disguised that the organization of our judicial system is at once a difficult and delicate task.  To extend the circuit courts equally throughout the different parts of the Union, and at the same time to avoid such a multiplication of members as would encumber the supreme appellate tribunal, is the object desired.  Perhaps it might be accomplished by dividing the circuit judges into two classes, and providing that the Supreme Court should be held by these classes alternately, the Chief Justice always presiding.