OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES TO GEORGE WASHINGTON, PRESIDENT
OF THE UNITED STATES.

SIR: The House of Representatives have attended to your communication
respecting the state of our country with all the sensibility that the
contemplation of the subject and a sense of duty can inspire.

We are gratified by the information that measures calculated to insure
a continuance of the friendship of the Indians and to maintain the
tranquillity of the Western frontier have been adopted, and we indulge
the hope that these, by impressing the Indian tribes with more correct
conceptions of the justice as well as power of the United States, will
be attended with success.

While we notice with satisfaction the steps that you have taken in
pursuance of the late treaties with several foreign nations, the
liberation of our citizens who were prisoners at Algiers is a subject
of peculiar felicitation. We shall cheerfully cooperate in any further
measures that shall appear on consideration to be requisite.

We have ever concurred with you in the most sincere and uniform
disposition to preserve our neutral relations inviolate, and it is of
course with anxiety and deep regret we hear that any interruption of
our harmony with the French Republic has occurred, for we feel with you
and with our constituents the cordial and unabated wish to maintain a
perfectly friendly understanding with that nation. Your endeavors to
fulfill that wish, and by all honorable means to preserve peace, and
to restore that harmony and affection which have heretofore so happily
subsisted between the French Republic and the United States, can not
fail, therefore, to interest our attention. And while we participate in
the full reliance you have expressed on the patriotism, self-respect,
and fortitude of our countrymen, we cherish the pleasing hope that a
mutual spirit of justice and moderation will insure the success of your
perseverance.

The various subjects of your communication will respectively meet with
the attention that is due to their importance.

When we advert to the internal situation of the United States, we deem
it equally natural and becoming to compare the present period with
that immediately antecedent to the operation of the Government, and to
contrast it with the calamities in which the state of war still involves
several of the European nations, as the reflections deduced from both
tend to justify as well as to excite a warmer admiration of ou