[For order see preceding page.]
In pursuance of the foregoing order, it is hereby directed that upon the day following the receipt of this the ensign at each United States naval station and of each United States naval vessel in commission be hoisted at half-mast from sunrise to sunset, and that thirteen guns be fired at sunrise, nineteen minute guns at meridian, and a national salute at sunset at each United States naval station and on board flagships and vessels acting singly, at home or abroad.
The officers of the Navy and Marine Corps will wear the usual badge of mourning for three months.
GEO. M. ROBESON, Secretary of the Navy.
SEVENTH ANNUAL MESSAGE.
EXECUTIVE MANSION, December 7, 1875.
To the Senate and House of Representatives:
In submitting my seventh annual message to Congress, in this centennial year of our national existence as a free and independent people, it affords me great pleasure to recur to the advancement that has been made from the time of the colonies, one hundred years ago. We were then a people numbering only 3,000,000. Now we number more than 40,000,000. Then industries were confined almost exclusively to the tillage of the soil. Now manufactories absorb much of the labor of the country.
Our liberties remain unimpaired; the bondmen have been freed from slavery; we have become possessed of the respect, if not the friendship, of all civilized nations. Our progress has been great in all the arts—in science, agriculture, commerce, navigation, mining, mechanics, law, medicine, etc,: and in general education the progress is likewise encouraging. Our thirteen States have become thirty-eight, including Colorado (which has taken the initiatory steps to become a State), and eight Territories, including the Indian Territory and Alaska, and excluding Colorado, making a territory extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. On the south we have extended to the Gulf of Mexico, and in the west from the Mississippi to the Pacific.
One hundred years ago the cotton gin, the steamship, the railroad, the telegraph, the reaping, sewing, and modern printing machines, and numerous other inventions of scarcely less value to our business and happiness were entirely unknown.