On the 16th of March, 1785, it was moved in Congress, that the same proposition should be referred to a committee, and it was referred by the votes of eight States against three.  We do not hear that any thing further is yet done on it.’

Page 286. ‘L’autorite du Congres etoit necessaire.’  The substance of the passage alluded to, in the journal of Congress, May the 26th, 1784, is, ’That the authority of Congress to make requisitions of troops, during peace, is questioned; that such an authority would be dangerous, combined with the acknowledged one of emitting or of borrowing money; and that a few troops only, being wanted, to guard magazines and garrison the frontier posts, it would be more proper, at present, to recommend than to require.’

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Mr. Jefferson presents his compliments to M. de Meusnier, and sends him copies of the thirteenth, twenty-third, and twenty-fourth articles of the treaty between the King of Prussia and the United States.

If M. de Meusnier proposes to mention the facts of cruelty, of which he and Mr Jefferson spoke yesterday, the twenty-fourth article will introduce them properly, because they produced a sense of the necessity of that article.  These facts are, 1.  The death of upwards of eleven thousand American prisoners, in one prison-ship (the Jersey), and in the space of three years. 2.  General Howe’s permitting our prisoners, taken at the battle of Germantown, and placed under a guard, in the yard of the State-house of Philadelphia, to be so long without any food furnished them, that many perished with hunger.  Where the bodies lay, it was seen that they had eaten all the grass around them, within their reach, after they had lost the power of rising or moving from their place. 3.  The second fact was the act of a commanding officer:  the first, of several commanding officers, and, for so long a time, as must suppose the approbation of government.  But the following was the act of government itself.  During the periods that our affairs seemed unfavorable, and theirs successful, that is to say, after the evacuation of New York, and again after the taking of Charleston, in South Carolina, they regularly sent our prisoners, taken on the seas and carried to England, to the East Indies.  This is so certain, that in the month of November or December, 1785, Mr. Adams having officially demanded a delivery of the American prisoners sent to the East Indies, Lord Caermarthen answered, officially, ’that orders were immediately issued for their discharge.’  M. de Meusnier is at liberty to quote this fact. 4.  A fact, to be ascribed not only to the government, but to the parliament, who passed an act for that purpose, in the beginning of the war, was the obliging our prisoners, taken at sea, to join them, and fight against their countrymen.  This they effected by starving and whipping them.  The insult on Captain Stanhope, which happened at Boston last year, was a consequence of this.  Two persons, Dunbar and