The President's Message was not delivered this year till the
Gth December, the 4th December falling on Saturday, and for some reason or other there was a day's delay in transmitting it, so that it was not received here till Wednesday, the 8th. It has two remarkable features, one, the proposal of a constitutional amendment requiring all the States to provide free schools, from which " religious, atheistic, and pagan tenets" should be entirely excluded,—a proposal on which we have commented sufficiently elsewhere,—and one a commentary on the condition of Cuba,—a passage which is supposed to mean that unless Spain can reduce Cuba to order within two or three months, the President will recommend to Congress a policy of in- tervention. This part of the Message has caused great excitement in Madrid, the more that the Navy-yards of the United States are known to be unusually active, and that the Secretary to the Navy has reported that he expects within a very short time to have vessels and gunboats, carrying five hundred guns, at the service of the Government. It is quite a question worthy of consideration whether Spain may not think a short war the most honourable way of ridding herself of the Cuban difficulty.—and but for the great supplies of money appar- ently derived from Cuba, we should be prepared to expect that this would be the case.
