that our own peace has been preserved through so perilous a season, and
ourselves permitted quietly to cultivate the earth and to practice and
improve those arts which tend to increase our comforts. The assurances,
indeed, of friendly disposition received from all the powers with whom
we have principal relations had inspired a confidence that our peace
with them would not have been disturbed. But a cessation of
irregularities which had affected the commerce of neutral nations and of
the irritations and injuries produced by them can not but add to this
confidence, and strengthens at the same time the hope that wrongs
committed on unoffending friends under a pressure of circumstances will
now be reviewed with candor, and will be considered as founding just
claims of retribution for the past and new assurance for the future.

Among our Indian neighbors also a spirit of peace and friendship
generally prevails, and I am happy to inform yon that the continued
efforts to introduce among them the implements and the practice of
husbandry and of the household arts have not been without success; that
they are becoming more and more sensible of the superiority of this
dependence for clothing and subsistence over the precarious resources of
hunting and fishing, and already we are able to announce that instead of
that constant diminution of their numbers produced by their wars and
their wants, some of them begin to experience an increase of population.

To this state of general peace with which we have been blessed, one only
exception exists. Tripoli, the least considerable of the Barbary States,
had come forward with demands unfounded either in right or in compact,
and had permitted itself to denounce war on our failure to comply before
a given day. The style of the demand admitted but one answer. I sent a
small squadron of frigates into the Mediterranean, with assurances to
that power of our sincere desire to remain in peace, but with orders to