not disposed to make out of mere complaisance to a false definition of the term privateer.  Finding that the Jane had purchased new carriages to mount two or three additional guns, which she had brought in her hold, and that she had opened additional port-holes for them, the carriages were ordered to be relanded, the additional port-holes stopped, and her means of defence reduced, to be exactly the same at her departure as at her arrival.  This was done on the general principle of allowing no party to arm within our ports.

4.  The seventeenth article of our treaty leaves armed vessels free to conduct, whithersoever they please, the ships and goods taken from their enemies without paying any duty, and to depart and be conducted freely to the places expressed in their commissions, which the captain shall be obliged to show.  It is evident, that this article does not contemplate a freedom to sell their prizes here; but on the contrary, a departure to some other place, always to be expressed in their commission, where their validity is to be finally adjudged.  In such case, it would be as unreasonable to demand duties on the goods they had taken from an enemy, as it would be on the cargo of a merchant vessel touching in our ports for refreshment or advices; and against this the article provides.  But the armed vessels of France have been also admitted to land and sell their prize-goods here for a consumption, in which case, it is as reasonable they should pay duties, as the goods of a merchantman landed and sold for consumption.  They have however demanded, and as a matter of right, to sell them free of duty, a right, they say, given by this article of the treaty, though the article does not give the right to sell at all.  Where a treaty does not give the principal right of selling, the additional one of selling duty free cannot be given:  and the laws, in admitting the principal right of selling, may withhold the additional one of selling duty free.  It must be observed, that our revenues are raised almost wholly on imported goods.  Suppose prize-goods enough should be brought in to supply our whole consumption.  According to their construction we are to lose our whole revenue.  I put the extreme case to evince, more extremely, the unreasonableness of the claim.  Partial supplies would affect the revenue but partially.  They would lessen the evil, but not the error, of the construction:  and I believe we may say, with truth, that neither party had it in contemplation, when penning this article, to abandon any part of its revenue for the encouragement of the sea-robbers of the other.