Congress should promptly correct the existing condition.  Ample revenues must be supplied not only for the ordinary expenses of the Government, but for the prompt payment of liberal pensions and the liquidation of the principal and interest of the public debt.  In raising revenue, duties should be so levied upon foreign products as to preserve the home market, so far as possible, to our own producers; to revive and increase manufactures; to relieve and encourage agriculture; to increase our domestic and foreign commerce; to aid and develop mining and building; and to render to labor in every field of useful occupation the liberal wages and adequate rewards to which skill and industry are justly entitled.  The necessity of the passage of a tariff law which shall provide ample revenue, need not be further urged.  The imperative demand of the hour is the prompt enactment of such a measure, and to this object I earnestly recommend that Congress shall make every endeavor.  Before other business is transacted, let us first provide sufficient revenue to faithfully administer the Government without the contracting of further debt, or the continued disturbance of our finances.

William McKINLEY.

Executive Mansion, April 7, 1897.

To the Senate and House of Representatives: 

Information which has recently come to me from the governors of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and from prominent citizens of these States and Tennessee, warrants the conclusion that widespread distress, involving the destruction of a large amount of property and loss of human life, has resulted from the floods which have submerged that section of the country.  These are stated, on reliable authority, to be the most destructive floods that have ever devastated the Mississippi Valley, the water being much higher than the highest stage it has reached before.  From Marion, Ark., north of Memphis, to Greenville, Miss., a distance of more than 250 miles by river, it is reported there are now at least fifty towns and villages under water, and a territory extending from 100 miles north of Memphis to 200 miles south, and from 5 to 40 miles wide, is submerged.  Hundreds of thousands of acres of cultivated soil, with growing crops, are included in the submerged territory.  In this section alone there are from 50,000 to 60,000 people whose property has been destroyed and whose business has been suspended.  Growing crops have been ruined, thousands of cattle have been drowned, and the inhabitants of certain areas threatened with starvation.  As a great majority of the sufferers are small farmers, they have thus been left entirely destitute, and will be unprepared for work even after the floods have subsided.

The entire Mississippi Valley in Arkansas is flooded and communication with many points cut off.  In Mississippi a like condition exists.  The levees in Louisiana, with a single exception, have held; but the water is rising and the situation there is reported as being extremely critical.