ition of all His favors, of
devoting the faculties with which we have been endowed by Him to His
glory and to our own temporal and eternal welfare.
In the relations of our Federal Union with our brethren of the human
race the changes which have occurred since the close of your last
session have generally tended to the preservation of peace and to the
cultivation of harmony. Before your last separation a war had unhappily
been kindled between the Empire of Russia, one of those with which our
intercourse has been no other than a constant exchange of good offices,
and that of the Ottoman Porte, a nation from which geographical
distance, religious opinions and maxims of government on their part
little suited to the formation of those bonds of mutual benevolence
which result from the benefits of commerce had kept us in a state,
perhaps too much prolonged, of coldness and alienation. The extensive,
fertile, and populous dominions of the Sultan belong rather to the
Asiatic than the European division of the human family. They enter but
partially into the system of Europe, nor have their wars with Russia and
Austria, the European States upon which they border, for more than a
century past disturbed the pacific relations of those States with the
other great powers of Europe. Neither France nor Prussia nor Great
Britain has ever taken part in them, nor is it to be expected that they
will at this time. The declaration of war by Russia has received the
approbation or acquiescence of her allies, and we may indulge the hope
that its progress and termination will be signalized by the moderation
and forbearance no less than by the energy of the Emperor Nicholas, and
that it will afford the opportunity for such collateral agency in behalf
of the suffering Greeks as will secure to them ultimately the triumph of
humanity and of freedom.
The state of our particular relations with France has scarcely varied in
the course of the present year. The commercial intercourse between the
two countries has continued to increase for the mutual benefit of both.
The claims of indemnity to numbers of our fellow-citizens for
depredations upon their property, heretofore committed during the
revolutionary governments, remain unadjusted, and still form the subject
of earnest representation and remonstrance. Recent advices from the
minister of the United States at Paris encourage the expectation that
the appeal to the justice of the French Government will
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