it will be found in a prohibition to the Farmers General, to purchase tobacco any where but in France.  You will perceive by this, that my object is to strengthen the connection between this country and my own in all useful points.  I am of opinion, that twenty-three thousand hogsheads of tobacco, the annual consumption of this country, do not exceed the amount of those commodities, which it is more advantageous to us to buy here than in England, or elsewhere; and such a commerce would powerfully reinforce the motives for a friendship from this country towards ours.  This friendship we ought to cultivate closely, considering the present dispositions of England towards us.

I am lately returned from a visit to that country.  The spirit of hostility to us has always existed in the mind of the King, but it has now extended itself through the whole mass of the people, and the majority in the public councils.  In a country, where the voice of the people influences so much the measures of administration, and where it coincides with the private temper of the King, there is no pronouncing on future events.  It is true, they have nothing to gain, and much to lose, by a war with us.  But interest is not the strongest passion in the human breast.  There are difficult points, too, still unsettled between us.  They have not withdrawn their armies out of our country, nor given satisfaction for the property they brought off.  On our part, we have not paid our debts, and it will take time to pay them.  In conferences with some distinguished mercantile characters, I found them sensible of the impossibility of our paying these debts at once, and that an endeavor to force universal and immediate payment, would render debts desperate, which are good in themselves.  I think we should not have differed in the term necessary.  We differed essentially in the article of interest.  For while the principal, and interest preceding and subsequent to the war, seem justly due from us, that which accrued during the war does not.  Interest is a compensation for the use of money.  Their money, in our hands, was in the form of lands and negroes.  Tobacco, the produce of these lands and negroes (or, as I may call it, the interest for them), being almost impossible of conveyance to the markets of consumption, because taken by themselves in its way there, sold during the war at five or six shillings the hundred.  This did not pay taxes, and for tools, and other plantation charges.  A man who should have attempted to remit to his creditor tobacco, for either principal or interest, must have remitted it three times before one cargo would have arrived safe:  and this from the depredations of their own nation, and often of the creditor himself; for some of the merchants entered deeply into the privateering business.  The individuals who did not, say they have lost this interest:  the debtor replies, that he has not gained it, and that it is a case where, a loss having been incurred, every one