be the most meritorious as I have nothing to give you in exchange. The quiet of Europe at this moment furnishes little which can attract your notice. Nor will that quiet be soon disturbed, at least for the current year. Perhaps it hangs on the life of the K. of Prussia, and that hangs by a very slender thread. American reputation in Europe is not such as to be flattering to its citizens. Two circumstances are particularly objected to us, the nonpaiment of our debts, and the want of energy in our government. These discourage a connection with us. I own it to be my opinion that good will arise from the destruction of our credit. I see nothing else which can restrain our disposition to luxury, and the loss of those manners which alone can preserve republican government. As it is impossible to prevent credit, the best way would be to cure it's ill effects by giving an instantaneous recovery to the creditor; this would be reducing purchases on credit to purchases for ready money. A man would then see a poison painted on everything he wished but had not ready money to pay for. I fear from an expression in your letter that the people of Kentucké think of separating not only from Virginia (in which they are right) but also from the confederacy. I own I should think this a most calametous event, and such an one as every good citizen on both sides should set himself against. Our present federal limits are not too large for good government, nor will the increase of votes in Congress produce any ill effect. On the contrary it will drown the little divisions at present existing there. Our con

federacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North & South is to be peopled. We should take care too, not to think it for the interest of that great continent to press too soon on the Spaniards. Those countries cannot be in better hands. My fear is that they are too feeble to hold them till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece. The navigation of the Mississippi we must have. This is all we are as yet ready to receive. I have made acquaintance with a very sensible candid gentleman here who was in South America during the revolt which took place there while our revolution was working. He says that those disturbances (of which we scarcely heard anything) cost on both sides an hundred thousand lives. I have made a particular acquaintance here with Monsieur de Buffon, and have a great desire to give him the best idea I can of our elk. Perhaps your situation may enable you to aid me in this. Were it possible, you could not oblige me more than by sending me the horns, skeleton, & skin of an elk. The most desireable form of receiving them would be to have the skin slit from the under paw along the belly to the tail, & down the thighs to the knee, to take the animal out, leaving the legs and hoofs, the bones of the head, & the horns attached to the skin by sewing up the belly & shipping the skin it would present the form of the animal. However as an opportunity of doing this is scarcely expected I shall be glad to receive them detached, packed in a box, & sent to Richmond to the care of Doctor Currie.

Every thing of this kind is precious here, and to prevent my adding to your trouble I must close my letter with assurances of the esteem & attachment with which I am Dr Sir Your friend & servt.

P. S. I must add a prayer for some Peccan nuts, 100, if possible, to be packed in a box of sand and They might come either directly or via N.

sent me.

York.

TO C. W. F. DUMAS.1

PARIS, Feb. 2, 1786.

SIR, I was honoured some time ago with a letter from you of Dec. 6 inclosing two for America which I forwarded by the first occasion. On the 18th of this month I received a letter from his Excellency the Count de Vergennes expressing the interest which he takes in your welfare and recommending you to Congress. This I had an opportunity of forwarding from hence on the 27th of Jan. under cover to Mr. Jay. Yesterday I was gratified with the receipt of your favor of Jan. 27 containing a copy of the resolution. of Congress of Oct. 14 in your favor, and which I wish had been more so. With respect to the paiment of the arrearages, two things are necessary, first an order from the treasury and secondly money to comply with it. Mr. Grand wrote to me this morning that he had not now as much left to pay a bill of Mr. Carmichael's for 4500 livres just presented. I shall 1 From a copy courteously furnished by Mr. Harold Brown, of Providence.

forward your letter to Mr. Jay the next week with a request that the necessary measures may be taken for the paiment of your arrearages and interest. In the mean time I think you would do well to write a line for the same purpose to Mr. Jay, or to the Commissioners of the Treasury. I do not mean that what I have said above should prevent your drawing in due time for the salary of the current quarter. I will honour that draught from a private fund with which I can take that liberty. I thank you for what you say of the Notes on Virginia. It is much more than they deserve tho the various matters they touch on would have been beyond the information of any one person whatever to have treated fully, and infinitely beyond mine, yet had I, at the time of writing them, had anything more in view than the satisfying a single individual, they should have been more attended to both in form and matter. Poor as they are, they have been thought worthy of a surreptitious translation here, with the appearance of which very soon I have been threatened. This has induced me to yield to a friendly proposition from the Abbé Morellet to translate and publish them himself submitting the sheets previously to my inspection. As a translation by so able a hand will lessen the faults of the original instead of their being multiplied by a hireling translator, I shall add to it a map, and such other advantages as may prevent the mortification of my seeing it appear in the injurious form threatened. I shall with great pleasure send a copy of the original to you by the first opportunity, praying your acceptance of it.

VOL. IV.-13

TO JAMES MADISON.

J.MSS.

PARIS, Feb. 8, 1786.

DEAR SIR,-My last letters have been of the 1st & 20th of Sep. and the 28th of Oct. Yours unacknowledged are of Aug. 20, Oct. 3, & Nov. 15. I take this the first safe opportunity of enclosing to you the bills of lading for your books, & two others for your namesake of Williamsburgh & for the attorney which I will pray you to forward. I thank you for the communication of the remonstrance against the assessment. Mazzei who is now in Holland promised me to have it published in the Leyden gazette. It will do us great honour. I wish it I wish it may be as much approved by our assembly as by the wisest part of Europe. I have heard with great pleasure that our assembly have come to the resolution of giving the regulation of their commerce to the federal head. I will venture to assert that there is not one of it's opposers who, placed on this ground, would not see the wisdom of this measure. The politics of Europe render it indispensably necessary that with respect to everything external we be one nation only, firmly hooped together. Interior government is what each state should keep to itself. If it could be seen in Europe that all our states could be brought to concur in what the Virginia assembly has done, it would produce a total revolution in their opinion of us, and respect for us. And it should ever be held in mind that insult & war are the consequences of a want of respectability in the national character. As long as the states exercise separately those acts of power