acco, 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 They have not withdrawn their armies out of our country, nor given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 mercha