We repeat with pleasure our assurances of confidence in your Administration and our ardent wish that your unabated zeal for the public good may be rewarded by the durable prosperity of the nation, and every ingredient of personal happiness.

JOHN LANGDON,

President pro tempore.

NOVEMBER 9, 1792.

REPLY OF THE PRESIDENT.

I derive much pleasure, gentlemen, from your very satisfactory address.  The renewed assurances of your confidence in my Administration and the expression of your wish for my personal happiness claim and receive my particular acknowledgments.  In my future endeavor for the public welfare, to which my duty may call me, I shall not cease to count upon the firm, enlightened, and patriotic support of the Senate.

GEORGE WASHINGTON.

NOVEMBER 9, 1792.

ADDRESS OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES TO GEORGE WASHINGTON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

SIR:  The House of Representatives, who always feel a satisfaction in meeting you, are much concerned that the occasion for mutual felicitation afforded by the circumstances favorable to the national prosperity should be abated by a continuance of the hostile spirit of many of the Indian tribes, and particularly that the reiterated efforts for effecting a general pacification with them should have issued in new proofs of their persevering enmity and the barbarous sacrifice of citizens who, as the messengers of peace, were distinguishing themselves by their zeal for the public service.  In our deliberations on this important department of our affairs we shall be disposed to pursue every measure that may be dictated by the sincerest desire, on one hand, of cultivating peace and manifesting by every practicable regulation our benevolent regard for the welfare of those misguided people, and by the duty we feel, on the other, to provide effectually for the safety and protection of our fellow-citizens.

While with regret we learn that symptoms of opposition to the law imposing duties on spirits distilled within the United States have manifested themselves, we reflect with consolation that they are confined to a small portion of our fellow-citizens.  It is not more essential to the preservation of true liberty that a government should be always ready to listen to the representations of its constituents and to accommodate its measures to the sentiments and wishes of every part of them, as far as will consist with the good of the whole, than it is that the just authority of the laws should be steadfastly maintained.  Under this impression every department of the Government and all good citizens must approve the measures you have taken and the purpose you have formed to execute this part of your trust with firmness and energy; and be assured, sir, of every constitutional aid and cooperation which may become requisite on our part.  And we hope that, while the progress of contentment under the law in question is as obvious as it is rational, no particular part of the community may be permitted to withdraw from the general burthens of the country by a conduct as irreconcilable to national justice as it is inconsistent with public decency.