ANDREW JACKSON.

[Footnote 13:  Relating to the treaty of indemnity with Spain of February 17, 1834.]

VETO MESSAGE.

WASHINGTON, March 3, 1835.

To the Senate: 

I respectfully return to the Senate, where it originated, the “act to authorize the Secretary of the Treasury to compromise the claims allowed by the commissioners under the treaty with the King of the Two Sicilies, concluded October 14, 1832,” without my signature.

The act is, in my judgment, inconsistent with the division of powers in the Constitution of the United States, as it is obviously founded on the assumption that an act of Congress can give power to the Executive or to the head of one of the Departments to negotiate with a foreign government.  The debt due by the King of the Two Sicilies will, after the commissioners have made their decision, become the private vested property of the citizens of the United States to whom it may be awarded.  Neither the Executive nor the Legislature can properly interfere with it without their consent.  With their consent the Executive has competent authority to negotiate about it for them with a foreign government—­an authority Congress can not constitutionally abridge or increase.

ANDREW JACKSON.

PROCLAMATION.

[From Statutes at Large (Little, Brown & Co.), Vol.  XI, p. 781.]

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

A PROCLAMATION.

Whereas by an act of Congress of the United States of the 24th of May, 1828, entitled “An act in addition to an act entitled ’An act concerning discriminating duties of tonnage and impost’ and to equalize the duties on Prussian vessels and their cargoes,” it is provided that, upon satisfactory evidence being given to the President of the United States by the government of any foreign nation that no discriminating duties of tonnage or impost are imposed or levied in the ports of the said nation upon vessels wholly belonging to citizens of the United States or upon the produce, manufactures, or merchandise imported in the same from the United States or from any foreign country, the President is hereby authorized to issue his proclamation declaring that the foreign discriminating duties of tonnage and impost within the United States are and shall be suspended and discontinued so far as respects the vessels of the said foreign nation and the produce, manufactures, or merchandise imported into the United States in the same from the said foreign nation or from any other foreign country, the said suspension to take effect from the time of such notification being given to the President of the United States and to continue so long as the reciprocal exemption of vessels belonging to citizens of the United States and their cargoes, as aforesaid, shall be continued, and no longer; and