The provision for the expenses of the surveys of public lands is less than one-half of the usual appropriation for that service and what are understood to be its actual demands.

Reduction in the expenditures for light-houses, beacons, and fog stations is also made in similar proportion.

Of the class for which no appropriation is made, among the most noticeable, perhaps, is that portion of the general expenses of the District of Columbia on behalf of the United States, as appropriated in former years, and the judgments of the Court of Claims.  The failure to make a reasonable contribution to the expenses of the nation’s capital is an apparent dereliction on the part of the United States and rank injustice to the people here who bear the burdens, while to refuse or neglect to provide for the payment of solemn judgments of its own courts is apparently to repudiate.  Of a different character, but as prejudicial to the Treasury, is the omission to make provision to enable the Secretary of the Treasury to have the rebel archives and records of captured and abandoned property examined and information furnished therefrom for the use of the Government.

Finally, without further specification of detail, it may be said that the act which in its title purports to make provision for a diverse and greatly extended civil service unhappily appropriates an amount not more than 65 per cent of its ordinary demands.

The legislative department establishes and defines the service, and devolves upon the Executive Departments the obligation of submitting annually the needful estimates of expenses of such service.  Congress properly exacts implicit obedience to the requirements of the law in the administration of the public service and rigid accountability in the expenditures therefor.  It is submitted that a corresponding responsibility and obligation rest upon it to make the adequate appropriations to render possible such administration and tolerable such exaction.  Anything short of an ample provision for a specified service is necessarily fraught with disaster to the public interests and is a positive injustice to those charged with its execution.

To appropriate and to execute are corresponding obligations and duties, and the adequacy of the former is the necessary measure of the efficiency of the execution.

In this eighth month of the present session of Congress—­nearly one month of the fiscal year to which this appropriation applies having passed—­I do not feel warranted in vetoing an absolutely necessary appropriation bill; but in signing it I deem it a duty to show where the responsibility belongs for whatever embarrassments may arise in the execution of the trust confided to me.

U.S.  GRANT.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, July 31, 1876.

To the Senate of the United States: 

In response to the resolution of the Senate of July 20, 1876, calling upon the President to communicate to the Senate, if in his opinion not incompatible with the public interest, any information in regard to the slaughter of American citizens at Hamburg, S.C., I have the honor to submit the following inclosures, to wit: