be able to submit the results of that
negotiation to the Senate during its present session.

The very liberal treaty which was entered into last year by the United
States and Nicaragua has been ratified by the latter Republic.

Costa Rica, with the earnestness of a sincerely friendly neighbor,
solicits a reciprocity of trade, which I commend to the consideration
of Congress.

The convention created by treaty between the United States and Venezuela
in July, 1865, for the mutual adjustment of claims, has been held,
and its decisions have been received at the Department of State. The
heretofore-recognized Government of the United States of Venezuela has
been subverted. A provisional government having been instituted under
circumstances which promise durability, it has been formally recognized.

I have been reluctantly obliged to ask explanation and satisfaction
for national injuries committed by the President of Hayti. The political
and social condition of the Republics of Hayti and St. Domingo is very
unsatisfactory and painful. The abolition of slavery, which has been
carried into effect throughout the island of St. Domingo and the entire
West Indies, except the Spanish islands of Cuba and Porto Rico, has
been followed by a profound popular conviction of the rightfulness
of republican institutions and an intense desire to secure them.
The attempt, however, to establish republics there encounters many
obstacles, most of which may be supposed to result from long-indulged
habits of colonial supineness and dependence upon European monarchical
powers. While the United States have on all occasions professed a
decided unwillingness that any part of this continent or of its adjacent
islands shall be made a theater for a new establishment of monarchical
power, too little has been done by us, on the other hand, to attach the
communities by which we are surrounded to our own country, or to lend
even a moral support to the efforts they are so resolutely and so
constantly making to secure republican institutions for themselves.
It is indeed a question of grave consideration whether our recent and
present example is not calculated to check the growth and expansion of
free principles, and make those communities distrust, if not dread,
a government which at will consigns to military domination States that
are integral parts of our Federal Union, and, while ready to resist any
attempts by other nations to extend to this hemisphere the