Since my letter of April the 16th, yours have been received of March the 12th, 12th, 13th, 13th, and 19th.  Before the receipt of these, one of which covered the form of your passports, it had been determined here, that passports should be issued in our own ports only, as well to secure us against those collusions which would be fraudulent towards our friends, and would, introduce a competition injurious to our own vessels, as to induce these to remain in our own service, and thereby give to the productions of our own soil the protection of its own flag in its passage to foreign markets.  As our citizens are free to purchase and use foreign-built vessels, and these, like all their other lawful property, are entitled to the protection of their government, passports will be issued to them as freely as to home-built vessels.  This is strictly within our treaties, the letter of which, as well as their spirit, authorizes passports to all vessels belonging to citizens of the United States.  Our laws, indeed, indulge home-built vessels with the payment of a lower tonnage, and to evidence their right to this, permit them alone to take out registers from our own offices, but they do not exclude foreign-built vessels owned by our citizens from any other right.  As our home-built vessels are adequate to but a small proportion of our transportation, if we could not suddenly augment the stock of our shipping, our produce would be subject to war-insurance in the vessels of the belligerent powers, though we remain at peace ourselves.

In one of your letters of March the 13th, you express your apprehension that some of the belligerent powers may stop our vessels going with grain to the ports of their enemies, and ask instructions which may meet the question in various points of view, intending, however, in the mean time, to contend for the amplest freedom of neutral nations.  Your intention in this is perfectly proper, and coincides with the ideas of our own government in the particular case you put, as in general cases.  Such a stoppage to an unblockaded port would be so unequivocal an infringement of the neutral rights, that we cannot conceive it will be attempted.  With respect to our conduct, as a neutral nation, it is marked out in our treaties with France and Holland, two of the belligerent powers:  and as the duties of neutrality require an equal conduct to both parties, we should, on that ground, act on the same principles towards Great Britain.  We presume that this would be satisfactory to her, because of its equality, and because she too has sanctioned the same principles in her treaty with France.  Even our seventeenth article with France, which might be disagreeable, as from its nature it is unequal, is adopted exactly by Great Britain in her fortieth article with the same power, and would have laid her, in a like case, under the same unequal obligations against us.  We wish then, that it could be arranged with Great Britain, that our treaties with France