I recommend such a modification of the existing law as will permit the first or sole assistant, or in the case of the Treasury Department, where the assistants are not graded, that one who may be designated by the President, to discharge the duties of the head of the Department until a successor is appointed and qualified. BENJ. HARRISON. EXECUTIVE MANSION, January 31, 1891. DEATH OF ADMIRÅL PORTER. To the Senate and House of Representatives: The Admiral of the Navy, David Dixon Porter, died at his residence in the city of Washington this morning at 8:15 o'clock, in the seventy-eighth year of his age. He entered the naval service as a midshipman February 2, 1829, and had been since continuously in service, having been made Admiral August 15, 1870. He was the son of Commodore David Porter, one of the greatest of our naval commanders. His service during the civil war was conspicuously brilliant and successful, and his death ends a very high and honorable career. His countrymen will sincerely mourn his loss, while they cherish with grateful pride the memory of his deeds. To officers of the Navy his life will continue to yield inspiration and encouragement. EXECUTIVE MANSION, February 13, 1891. BENJ. HARRISON. DEATH OF GENERAL SHERMAN. To the Senate and House of Representatives: The death of William Tecumseh Sherman, which took place to-day at his residence in the city of New York at 1 o'clock and 50 minutes p. m., is an event that will bring sorrow to the heart of every patriotic citizen. No living American was so loved and venerated as he. To look upon his face, to hear his name, was to have one's love of country intensified. He served his country, not for fame, not out of a sense of professional duty, but for love of the flag and of the beneficient civil institutions of which it was the emblem. He was an ideal soldier, and shared to the fullest the esprit de corps of the Army; but he cherished the civil institutions organized under the Constitution, and was a soldier only that these might be perpetuated in undiminished usefulness and honor. He was in nothing an imitator. A profound student of military science and precedent, he drew from them principles and suggestions, and so adapted them to novel conditions that his campaigns will continue to be the profitable study of the military profession throughout the world. His genial nature made him comrade to every soldier of the great Union Army. No presence was so welcome and inspiring at the camp-fire or commandery as his. His career was complete; his honors were full. He had received from the Government the highest rank known to our military establishment, and from the people unstinted gratitude and love. No word of mine can add to his fame. His death has followed in startling quickness that of the Admiral of the Navy; and it is a sad and notable incident that when the Department under which he served shall have put on the usual emblems of mourning, four of the eight Executive Departments will be simultaneously draped in black, and one other has but to-day removed the crape from its walls. EXECUTIVE MANSION, February, 14, 1891. BENJ. HARRISON. THE FAMINE IN RUSSIA. To the Senate and House of Representatives: The famine prevailing in some of the provinces of Russia is so severe and widespread as to have attracted the sympathetic interest of a large number of our liberal and favored people. In some of the great grain-producing States of the West movements have already been organized to collect flour and meal for the relief of these perishing Russian families, and the response has been such as to justify the belief that a ship's cargo can very soon be delivered at the seaboard through the generous coöperation of the transportation lines. It is most appropriate that a people whose storehouses have been so lavishly filled with all the fruits of the earth by the gracious favor of God should manifest their gratitude by large gifts to his suffering children in other lands. The Secretary of the Navy has no steam vessel at his disposal that could be used for the transportation of these supplies, and I therefore recommend that he be authorized to charter a suitable vessel to receive them, if a sufficient amount should be offered, and to send them under the charge of a naval officer to such Russian port as may be most convenient for ready distribution to those most in need. EXECUTIVE MANSION, BENJ. HARRISON. THE MOB AT VALPARAISO, CHILE. To the Senate and House of Representatives: In my annual message, delivered to Congress at the beginning of the present session, after a brief statement of the facts then in the possession of this Government touching the assault, in the streets of Valparaiso, Chile, upon the sailors of the U. S. S. Baltimore, on the evening of the 16th of October last, I said: This Government is now awaiting the result of an investigation which has been conducted by the criminal court at Valparaiso. It is reported unofficially that the investigation is about completed, and it is expected that the result will soon be communicated to this Government, together with some adequate and satisfactory response to the note by which the attention of Chile was called to this incident. If these just expectations should be disappointed or further needless delay intervene, I will, by a special message, bring this matter again to the attention of Congress for such action as may be necessary. In my opinion the time has now come when I should lay before. the Congress and the country the correspondence between this Government and the Government of Chile, from the time of the breaking out of the revolution against Balmaceda, together with all other facts in possession of the Executive Department relating to this matter. The diplomatic correspondence is herewith transmitted, together with some correspondence between the naval officers for the time in command in Chilean waters and the Secretary of the Navy and also the evidence taken at the Mare Island navyyard since the arrival of the Baltimore at San Francisco. deem it necessary in this communication to attempt any full analysis of the correspondence or of the evidence. A brief restatement of the international questions involved and of the reasons why the responses of the Chilean Government are unsatisfactory is all that I deem necessary. It may be well, at the outset, to say that whatever may have been said in this country or in Chile in criticism of Mr. Egan, our minister at Santiago, the true history of this exciting period in Chilean affairs, from the outbreak of the revolution until this time, discloses no act on the part of Mr. Egan unworthy of his position or that could justly be the occasion of serious animadversion or criticism. He has, I think, on the whole, borne himself, in very trying circumstances, with dignity, discretion, and courage, and has conducted the correspondence with ability, courtesy, and fairness. It is worth while also at the beginning to say that the right of Mr. Egan to give shelter in the legation to certain adherents of the Balmaceda Government, who applied to him for asylum, has not been denied by the Chilean authorities, nor has any demand been made for the surrender of these refugees. That there was urgent need of asylum is shown by Mr. Egan's note of August 24, 1891, describing the disorders that prevailed in Santiago, and by the evidence of Capt. Schley as to the pillage and violence that.prevailed at Valparaiso. The correspondence discloses, however, that the request of Mr. Egan for a safe conduct from the country, in behalf of these refugees, was denied. The precedents cited by him in the correspondence, particularly the case of the revolution in Peru in 1865, did not leave the Chilean Government in a position to deny the right of asylum to political refugees, and seemed very clearly to support Mr. Egan's contention that a safe conduct to neutral territory was a necessary and acknowledged incident of the asylum. These refugees have very recently, without formal safe conduct, but by the acquiesence of the Chilean authorities, been placed on board the Yorktown and are now being conveyed to Callao, Peru. This incident might be considered wholly closed, but for the disrespect manifested toward this Government by the close and offensive police surveillance of the legation premises, which was maintained during most of the period of the stay of the refugees therein. After the date of After the date of my annual message, and up to the time of the transfer of the refugees to the Yorktown, the legation premises seem to have been surrounded by police in uniform, and police agents or detectives in citizens' dress, who offensively scrutinized persons entering or leaving the legation, and on one or more occasions arrested members of the minister's family. Commander Evans, who, by my direction, recently visited Mr. Egan at Santiago, in his telegram to the Navy Department, described the legation as "a veritable prison," and states that the police agents or detectives were, after his arrival, withdrawn during his stay. It appears further, from the note of Mr. Egan of November 20, 1891, that on one occasion at least these police agents, whom he declares to be known to him, invaded the legation premises, pounding upon its windows and using insulting and threatening language towards persons therein. This breach of the right of a minister to freedom from police espionage and restraint seems to have been so flagrant that the Argentine minister, who was dean of the diplomatic corps, having observed it, felt called upon to protest against it to the Chilean minister of foreign affairs. The Chilean authorities have, as will be observed from the correspondence, charged the refugees and the inmates of the legation with insulting the police; but it seems to me incredible that men whose lives were in jeopardy, and whose safety could only be secured by retirement and quietness, should have sought to provoke a collision which could only end in their destruction, or to aggravate their condition by intensifying a popular feeling that at one time so threatened the legation as to require Mr. Egan to appeal to the minister of foreign affairs. But the most serious incident disclosed by the correspondence is that of the attack upon the sailors of the Baltimore in the streets of Valparaiso on the 16th of October last. In my annual message, speaking upon the information then in my possession, I said: So far as I have yet been able to learn, no other explanation of this bloody work has been suggested than that it had its origin in hostility to these men as sailors of the United States, wearing the uniform of their Government, and not in any individual act or personal animosity. We have now received from the Chilean Government an abstract of the conclusions of the fiscal general upon the testimony taken by the judge of crimes in an investigation which was made to extend over nearly three months. I very much regret to be compelled to say that this report does not enable me to modify the conclusion announced in my annual message. I am still of the opinion that our sailors were assaulted, beaten, stabbed, and killed, not for anything they or any one of them had done, but for what the Government of the United States had done, or was charged with having done, by its civil officers and naval commanders. If that be the true aspect of the case, the injury was to the Government of the United States, not to these poor sailors who were assaulted in a manner so brutal and so cowardly. Before attempting to give an outline of the facts upon which this conclusion rests, I think it right to say a word or two upon the legal aspect of the case. The Baltimore was in the harbor of Valparaiso by virtue of that general invitation which nations are held to extend to the war vessels of other powers with which they have friendly relations. This invitation, I think, must be held ordinarily to embrace the privilege of such communication with the shore as is reasonable, necessary, and proper for the comfort and convenience of the officers and men of such vessels. Capt. Schley testifies that when his vessel returned to Valparaiso, on September 14, the city |