The just and impartial counsel of the President in such cases has never been withheld, and his efforts have been rewarded by the prevention of sanguinary strife or angry contentions between peoples whom we regard as brethren.

The existence of this growing tendency convinces the President that the time is ripe for a proposal that shall enlist the good will and active cooperation of all the States of the Western Hemisphere, both north and south, in the interest of humanity and for the common weal of nations.

He conceives that none of the Governments of America can be less alive than our own to the dangers and horrors of a state of war, and especially of war between kinsmen.  He is sure that none of the chiefs of Governments on the continent can be less sensitive than he is to the sacred duty of making every endeavor to do away with the chances of fratricidal strife.  And he looks with hopeful confidence to such active assistance from them as will serve to show the broadness of our common humanity and the strength of the ties which bind us all together as a great and harmonious system of American Commonwealths.

Impressed by these views, the President extends to all the independent countries of North and South America an earnest invitation to participate in a general congress to be held in the city of Washington on the 24th day of November, 1882, for the purpose of considering and discussing the methods of preventing war between the nations of America.  He desires that the attention of the congress shall be strictly confined to this one great object; that its sole aim shall be to seek a way of permanently, averting the horrors of cruel and bloody combat between countries, oftenest of one blood and speech, or the even worse calamity of internal commotion and civil strife; that it shall regard the burdensome and far-reaching consequences of such struggles, the legacies of exhausted finances, of oppressive debt, of onerous taxation, of ruined cities, of paralyzed industries, of devastated fields, of ruthless conscription, of the slaughter of men, of the grief of the widow and the orphan, of imbittered resentments that long survive those who provoked them and heavily afflict the innocent generations that come after.

The President is especially desirous to have it understood that in putting forth this invitation the United States does not assume the position of counseling, or attempting through the voice of the congress to counsel, any determinate solution of existing questions which may now divide any of the countries of America.  Such questions can not properly come before the congress.  Its mission is higher.  It is to provide for the interests of all in the future, not to settle the individual differences of the present.  For this reason especially the President has indicated a day for the assembling of the congress so far in the future as to leave good ground for hope that by the time named the present situation on the South Pacific coast will be happily terminated, and that those engaged in the contest may take peaceable part in the discussion and solution of the general question affecting in an equal degree the well-being of all.