BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

A PROCLAMATION.

The completed circle of summer and winter, seedtime and harvest,
has brought us to the accustomed season at which a religious people
celebrates with praise and thanksgiving the enduring mercy of Almighty
God. This devout and public confession of the constant dependence of
man upon the divine favor for all the good gifts of life and health
and peace and happiness, so early in our history made the habit of
our people, finds in the survey of the past year new grounds for its
joyful and grateful manifestation.

In all the blessings which depend upon benignant seasons, this has
indeed been a memorable year. Over the wide territory of our country,
with all its diversity of soil and climate and products, the earth has
yielded a bountiful return to the labor of the husbandman. The
health of the people has been blighted by no prevalent or widespread
diseases. No great disasters of shipwreck upon our coasts or to our
commerce on the seas have brought loss and hardship to merchants or
mariners and clouded the happiness of the community with sympathetic
sorrow.

In all that concerns our strength and peace and greatness as a nation;
in all that touches the permanence and security of our Government and
the beneficent institutions on which it rests; in all that affects
the character and dispositions of our people and tests our capacity
to enjoy and uphold the equal and free condition of society, now
permanent and universal throughout the land, the experience of the
last year is conspicuously marked by the protecting providence of God