In conclusion I especially entreat the people’s representatives in the Congress, who are charged with the responsibility of inaugurating measures for the safety and prosperity of our common country, to promptly and effectively consider the ills of our critical financial plight.  I have suggested a remedy which my judgment approves.  I desire, however, to assure the Congress that I am prepared to cooperate with them in perfecting any other measure promising thorough and practical relief, and that I will gladly labor with them in every patriotic endeavor to further the interests and guard the welfare of our countrymen, whom in our respective places of duty we have undertaken to serve.

GROVER CLEVELAND.

[Footnote 23:  See pp. 439, 531-532.]

[Footnote 24:  See p. 477.]

[Footnote 25:  See p. 624.]

[Footnote 26:  See pp. 561-565.]

[Footnote 27:  See pp. 567-568.]

SPECIAL MESSAGES.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, December 17, 1895.

To the Congress: 

In my annual message addressed to the Congress on the 3d instant I called attention to the pending boundary controversy between Great Britain and the Republic of Venezuela and recited the substance of a representation made by this Government to Her Britannic Majesty’s Government suggesting reasons why such dispute should be submitted to arbitration for settlement and inquiring whether it would be so submitted.[28]

The answer of the British Government, which was then awaited, has since been received, and, together with the dispatch to which it is a reply, is hereto appended.

Such reply is embodied in two communications addressed by the British prime minister to Sir Julian Pauncefote, the British ambassador at this capital.  It will be seen that one of these communications is devoted exclusively to observations upon the Monroe doctrine, and claims that in the present instance a new and strange extension and development of this doctrine is insisted on by the United States; that the reasons justifying an appeal to the doctrine enunciated by President Monroe are generally inapplicable “to the state of things in which we live at the present day,” and especially inapplicable to a controversy involving the boundary line between Great Britain and Venezuela.

Without attempting extended argument in reply to these positions, it may not be amiss to suggest that the doctrine upon which we stand is strong and sound, because its enforcement is important to our peace and safety as a nation and is essential to the integrity of our free institutions and the tranquil maintenance of our distinctive form of government.  It was intended to apply to every stage of our national life and can not become obsolete while our Republic endures.  If the balance of power is justly a cause for jealous anxiety among the Governments of the Old World and a subject for our absolute noninterference, none the less is an observance of the Monroe doctrine of vital concern to our people and their Government.