Its importance has
frequently been underestimated, and the support of good men has thus
been lost by their lack of interest in its success. Besides all these
difficulties, those responsible for the administration of the Government
in its executive branches have been and still are often annoyed and
irritated by the disloyalty to the service and the insolence of
employees who remain in place as the beneficiaries and the relics and
reminders of the vicious system of appointment which civil-service
reform was intended to displace.

And yet these are but the incidents of an advance movement which is
radical and far-reaching. The people are, notwithstanding, to be
congratulated upon the progress which has been made and upon the firm,
practical, and sensible foundation upon which this reform now rests.

With a continuation of the intelligent fidelity which has hitherto
characterized the work of the Commission; with a continuation and
increase of the favor and liberality which have lately been evinced by
the Congress in the proper equipment of the Commission for its work;
with a firm but conservative and reasonable support of the reform by
all its friends, and with the disappearance of opposition which must
inevitably follow its better understanding, the execution of the
civil-service law can not fail to ultimately answer the hopes in which
it had its origin.

GROVER CLEVELAND.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, _July 26, 1888_.

_To the Senate of the United States_:

I transmit herewith, in response to a resolution of the Senate of 11th
April last, a report of the Secretary of State, with accompanying
correspondence, relating to the pending dispute between the Government
of Venezuela and the Government of Great Britain concerning the
boundaries between British Guiana and Venezuela.

GROVER CLEVELAND.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, _August 6, 1888_.

_To the Senate and House of Representatives_:

It becomes my painful duty to announce to the Congress and to the people
of the United States the death of Philip H. Sheridan, General of the
Army, which occurred at a late hour last night at his summer home in the
State of Massachusetts.

The death of this valiant soldier and patriotic son of the Republic,
though his long illness has been regarded with anxiety, has nevertheless
shocked the country and caused universal grief.

He had established for himself a stronghold in the hearts of his
fellow-countrymen, who soon caught the true me