WILLIAM McKINLEY.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, Washington, June 6, 1900.

To the Senate of the United States: 

In further response to the resolution of the Senate of January 17, 1900, requesting, among other things, information tending to throw light upon the conduct and events of the insurrection against the authority of the United States in the Philippine Islands, I transmit herewith a correspondence between the Secretary of War and the officers of the Second Division of the Eighth Army Corps.

WILLIAM McKINLEY.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, December 3, 1900.

To the Senate and House of Representatives: 

At the outgoing of the old and the incoming of the new century you begin the last session of the Fifty-sixth Congress with evidences on every hand of individual and national prosperity and with proof of the growing strength and increasing power for good of Republican institutions.  Your countrymen will join with you in felicitation that American liberty is more firmly established than ever before, and that love for it and the determination to preserve it are more universal than at any former period of our history.

The Republic was never so strong, because never so strongly intrenched in the hearts of the people as now.  The Constitution, with few amendments, exists as it left the hands of its authors.  The additions which have been made to it proclaim larger freedom and more extended citizenship.  Popular government has demonstrated in its one hundred and twenty-four years of trial here its stability and security, and its efficiency as the best instrument of national development and the best safeguard to human rights.

When the Sixth Congress assembled in November, 1800, the population of the United States was 5,308,483.  It is now 76,304,799.  Then we had sixteen States.  Now we have forty-five.  Then our territory consisted of 909,050 square miles.  It is now 3,846,595 square miles.  Education, religion, and morality have kept pace with our advancement in other directions, and while extending its power the Government has adhered to its foundation principles and abated none of them in dealing with our new peoples and possessions.  A nation so preserved and blessed gives reverent thanks to God and invokes His guidance and the continuance of His care and favor.

In our foreign intercourse the dominant question has been the treatment of the Chinese problem.  Apart from this our relations with the powers have been happy.

The recent troubles in China spring from the antiforeign agitation which for the past three years has gained strength in the northern provinces.  Their origin lies deep in the character of the Chinese races and in the traditions of their Government.  The Taiping rebellion and the opening of Chinese ports to foreign trade and settlement disturbed alike the homogeneity and the seclusion of China.