This bill proposes to appropriate $5,000,000, to be paid in land scrip, and provides that “no claim or memorial shall be received by the commissioners” authorized by the act “unless accompanied by a release or discharge of the United States from all other and further compensation” than the claimant “may be entitled to receive under the provisions of this act.”  These claims are estimated to amount to a much larger sum than $5,000,000, and yet the claimant is required to release to the Government all other compensation, and to accept his share of a fund which is known to be inadequate.  If the claims be well founded, it would be unjust to the claimants to repudiate any portion of them, and the payment of the remaining sum could not be hereafter resisted.  This bill proposes to pay these claims not in the currency known to the Constitution, and not to their full amount.

Passed, as this bill has been, near the close of the session, and when many measures of importance necessarily claim the attention of Congress, and possibly without that full and deliberate consideration which the large sum it appropriates and the existing condition of the Treasury and of the country demand, I deem it to be my duty to withhold my approval, that it may hereafter undergo the revision of Congress.  I have come to this conclusion with regret.  In interposing my objections to its becoming a law I am fully sensible that it should be an extreme case which would make it the duty of the Executive to withhold his approval of any bill passed by Congress upon the ground of its inexpediency alone.  Such a case I consider this to be.

JAMES K. POLK.

PROCLAMATIONS.

[From Statutes at Large (Little & Brown), Vol.  IX, p. 999.]

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

A PROCLAMATION.

Whereas by an act of the Congress of the United States of the 3d of March, 1845, entitled “An act allowing drawback upon foreign merchandise exported in the original packages to Chihuahua and Santa Fe, in Mexico, and to the British North American Provinces adjoining the United States,” certain privileges are extended in reference to drawback to ports therein specially enumerated in the seventh section of said act, which also provides “that such other ports situated on the frontiers of the United States adjoining the British North American Provinces as may hereafter be found expedient may have extended to them the like privileges on the recommendation of the Secretary of the Treasury and proclamation duly made by the President of the United States specially designating the ports to which the aforesaid privileges are to be extended;” and

Whereas the Secretary of the Treasury has duly recommended to me the extension of the privileges of the law aforesaid to the port of Lewiston, in the collection district of Niagara, in the State of New York: