Although the health laws of the States should be found to need no present revisal by Congress, yet commerce claims that their attention be ever awake to them.

An immediate prohibition of the exportation of arms and ammunition is also submitted to your determination.

A state of our progress in exploring the principal rivers of that country, and of the information respecting them hitherto obtained, will be communicated as soon as we shall receive some further relations which we have reason shortly to expect.

On this first occasion of addressing Congress since, by the choice of my constituents, I have entered on a second term of administration, I embrace the opportunity to give this public assurance that I will exert my best endeavors to administer faithfully the executive department.

We must join in the unprofitable contest of trying which party can do the other the most harm.

The burthen of quarantines is felt at home as well as abroad; their efficacy merits examination.

I congratulate you on the liberation of our fellow citizens who were stranded on the coast of Tripoli and made prisoners of war.

I can not, then, but earnestly recommend to your early consideration the expediency of so modifying our militia system.

These payments, with those which had been made in 3 years and a half preceding, have extinguished of the funded debt nearly $18M of principal.

I shall now enter on the duties to which my fellow-citizens have again called me, and shall proceed in the spirit of those principles which they have approved.

I know that the acquisition of Louisiana had been disapproved by some from a candid apprehension that the enlargement of our territory would endanger its union.

The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes.

In matters of religion I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the Constitution independent of the powers of the General Government.

War will then be but a suspension of useful works, and a return to a state of peace, a return to the progress of improvement.

I have therefore undertaken on no occasion to prescribe the religious exercises suited to it, but have left them, as the Constitution found them, under the direction and discipline of the church or state authorities acknowledged by the several religious societies.

But who can limit the extent to which the federative principle may operate effectively?

What farmer, what mechanic, what laborer ever sees a taxgatherer of the United States?

We are firmly convinced, and we act on that conviction, that with nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties.