Daily National Intelligencer

COMMUNICATED.

A proposition more fully to demonstrate the beneficent and grateful intentions of Congress, in the bill now before the Senate, emphatically styled "The Act of Gratitude."

The provisions of the bill, as it passed the House of Representatives, embrace those only of the surviving heroes of the revolution, as are induced to indigence and want. Both of these terms admit some latitude of construction, and in many cases, evidently within the intentions of a magnanimous legislature, will not be reached by the bill as it now reads. I know one estimable man (and no doubt many others are similarly circumstanced) who has struggled with almost every species of adversity, from the dawn of the revolution to this day, whose independence of soul, disdaining to court relief, has gradually brought him to that restricted economy, that, in a miserable loghouse, he enjoys, with a small family, the slender income earned by the exercise of a vigorous and cultivated mind, not now, alas! seconded by an arm of healthy, youthful vigor. When the law, as now framed, is presented to this man, he will say he is not intended to be benefited by it, for he is not reduced to indigence and want; and yet a more deserving object of bounty does not remain upon the list of surviving officers of the Revolution. My proposition, therefore, is to vary the phraseology of the bill so as to make it embrace all cases of surviving revolutionary characters whose circumstances in life are not affluent, and I would further extend the provisions of the bill to continue the pension to the widow until her death or re-marriage, or to the children, where there is no widow, until they become of age.

The latitude of construction in this case would be on the side of mercy, liberality, and justice; and if it take from the Treasury a few more thousand dollars, the nation will say they could not be better applied.

B.