These articles are the products of countries collecting revenue from exports, and as we, the largest consumers, reduce the duties they proportionately increase them.  With this addition to the revenue, many duties now collected, and which give but an insignificant return for the cost of collection, might be remitted, and to the direct advantage of consumers at home.

I would mention those articles which enter into manufactures of all sorts.  All duty paid upon such articles goes directly to the cost of the article when manufactured here, and must be paid for by the consumers.  These duties not only come from the consumers at home, but act as a protection to foreign manufacturers of the same completed articles in our own and distant markets.

I will suggest or mention another subject bearing upon the problem of “how to enable the Secretary of the Treasury to accumulate balances.”  It is to devise some better method of verifying claims against the Government than at present exists through the Court of Claims, especially those claims growing out of the late war.  Nothing is more certain than that a very large percentage of the amounts passed and paid are either wholly fraudulent or are far in excess of the real losses sustained.  The large amount of losses proven—­on good testimony according to existing laws, by affidavits of fictitious or unscrupulous persons—­to have been sustained on small farms and plantations are not only far beyond the possible yield of those places for any one year, but, as everyone knows who has had experience in tilling the soil and who has visited the scenes of these spoliations, are in many instances more than the individual claimants were ever worth, including their personal and real estate.

The report of the Attorney-General, which will be submitted to Congress at an early day, will contain a detailed history of awards made and of claim pending of the class here referred to.

The report of the Secretary of War, accompanying this message, gives a detailed account of Army operations for the year just passed, expenses for maintenance, etc., with recommendations for legislation to which I respectfully invite your attention.  To some of these I invite special attention: 

First.  The necessity of making $300,000 of the appropriation for the Subsistence Department available before the beginning of the next fiscal year.  Without this provision troops at points distant from supply production must either go without food or existing laws must be violated.  It is not attended with cost to the Treasury.

Second.  His recommendation for the enactment of a system of annuities for the families of deceased officers by voluntary deductions from the monthly pay of officers.  This again is not attended with burden upon the Treasury, and would for the future relieve much distress which every old army officer has witnessed in the past—­of officers dying suddenly or being killed, leaving families without even the means of reaching their friends, if fortunate enough to have friends to aid them.