a high sense of national pride, may properly desire an adjustment of
their relations with us which would in all things confirm and in no
degree endanger the permanent peace and amity and the growing commerce
and prosperity which it has been the object and the effect of our
existing treaties to cherish and perpetuate.

I regard the very grave discontents of the people of the Pacific
States with the present working of the Chinese immigration, and their
still graver apprehensions therefrom in the future, as deserving
the most serious attention of the people of the whole country and a
solicitous interest on the part of Congress and the Executive. If this
were not my own judgment, the passage of this bill by both Houses of
Congress would impress upon me the seriousness of the situation, when
a majority of the representatives of the people of the whole country
had thought fit to justify so serious a measure of relief.

The authority of Congress to terminate a treaty with a foreign power
by expressing the will of the nation no longer to adhere to it is
as free from controversy under our Constitution as is the further
proposition that the power of making new treaties or modifying
existing treaties is not lodged by the Constitution in Congress, but
in the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, as
shown by the concurrence of two-thirds of that body. A denunciation of
a treaty by any government is confessedly justifiable only upon some
reason both of the highest justice and of the highest necessity. The
action of Congress in the matter of the French treaties in 1798, if
it be regarded as an abrogation by this nation of a subsisting treaty,
strongly illustrates the character and degree of justification which
was then thought suitable to such a proceeding. The preamble of the
act recites that the--