money formerly borrowed in Amsterdam, to pay the French debt, and appropriated by law (1790, August 4th, c. 34.  Sec. 2.) to that purpose, lying dead as was suggested, should be taken to pay the bank, and the President be authorized to borrow two millions of dollars more, out of which it should be replaced:  and if this should be done, the removal of our suspension of payments, as I had been about to propose, would be premature.  He expressed his disapprobation of the clause above mentioned; thought it highly improper in the legislature to change an appropriation once made, and added, that no one could tell in what that would end.  I concurred, but observed, that on a division of the House, the ayes for striking out the clause were twenty-seven, the noes twenty-six; whereon the Speaker gave his vote against striking out, which divides the House:  the clause for the disappropriation remained of course.  I mentioned suspicions, that the whole of this was a trick to serve the bank under a great existing embarrassment; that the debt to the bank was to be repaid by instalments; that the first instalment was of two hundred thousand dollars only, or rather one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, (because forty thousand of the two hundred thousand dollars would be the United States’ own dividend of the instalment.) Yet here were two millions to be paid them at once, and to be taken from a purpose of gratitude and honor, to which it had been appropriated.

December the 30th, 1792.  I took the occasion furnished by Pinckney’s letter of September the 19th, asking instructions how to conduct himself as to the French revolution, to lay down the catholic principle of republicanism, to wit, that every people may establish what form of government they please, and change it as they please; the will of the nation being the only thing essential.  I was induced to do this, in order to extract the President’s opinion on the question which divided Hamilton and myself in the conversation of November, 1792, and the previous one of the first week of November, on the suspension of payments to France:  and if favorable to mine, to place the principle on record in the letter-books of my office.  I therefore wrote the letter of December the 30th, to Pinckney, and sent it to the President, and he returned me his approbation in writing, in his note of the same date, which see.

February the 7th, 1793.  I waited on the President with letters and papers from Lisbon.  After going through these, I told him that I had for some time suspended speaking with him on the subject of my going out of office, because I had understood that the bill for intercourse with foreign nations was likely to be rejected by the Senate, in which case, the remaining business of the department would be too inconsiderable to make it worth while to keep it up.  But that the bill being now passed, I was freed from the considerations of propriety which had embarrassed me.  That &c. [nearly in the words of a letter to Mr. T. M. Randolph,