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.

Meanwhile foreign activity made itself felt in all quarters, not alone
on the coast, but along the great river arteries and in the remoter
districts, carrying new ideas and introducing new associations among a
primitive people which had pursued for centuries a national policy of
isolation.

The telegraph and the railway spreading over