measures for the safety and prosperity of our common country, to
promptly and effectively consider the ills of our critical financial
plight. I have suggested a remedy which my judgment approves. I desire,
however, to assure the Congress that I am prepared to cooperate with
them in perfecting any other measure promising thorough and practical
relief, and that I will gladly labor with them in every patriotic
endeavor to further the interests and guard the welfare of our
countrymen, whom in our respective places of duty we have undertaken
to serve.

GROVER CLEVELAND.

[Footnote 23: See pp. 439, 531-532.]

[Footnote 24: See p. 477.]

[Footnote 25: See p. 624.]

[Footnote 26: See pp. 561-565.]

[Footnote 27: See pp. 567-568.]

SPECIAL MESSAGES.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, _December 17, 1895_.

_To the Congress_:

In my annual message addressed to the Congress on the 3d instant I
called attention to the pending boundary controversy between Great
Britain and the Republic of Venezuela and recited the substance of a
representation made by this Government to Her Britannic Majesty's
Government suggesting reasons why such dispute should be submitted to
arbitration for settlement and inquiring whether it would be so
submitted.[28]

The answer of the British Government, which was then awaited, has since
been received, and, together with the dispatch to which it is a reply,
is hereto appended.

Such reply is embodied in two communications addressed by the British
prime minister to Sir Julian Pauncefote, the British ambassador at this
capital. It will be seen that one of these communications is devoted
exclusively to observations upon the Monroe doctrine, and claims that
in the present instance a new and strange extension and development
of this doctrine is insisted on by the United States; that the reasons
justifying an appeal to the doctrine enunciated by President Monroe are
generally inapplicable "to the state of things in which we live at the
present day," and especially inapplicable to a controversy involving the
boundary line between Great Britain and Venezuela.

Without attempting extended argument in reply to these positions, it may
not be amiss to suggest that the doctrine upon which we stand is strong
and sound, because its enforcement is important to our peace and safety
as a nation and is essential to the integrity of our free institutions
and the tranquil maintenance of our distinctive form of governm