t and Senate_.

The act of 1790, regulating the expenditures for foreign intercourse,
provided "that, exclusive of an outfit, which shall in no case exceed
one year's full salary to the minister plenipotentiary or charge
d'affaires to whom the same may be allowed, the President shall not
allow to any minister plenipotentiary a greater sum than at the rate of
$9,000 per annum as a compensation for all his personal services and
other expenses, nor a greater sum for the same than $4,500 per annum to
a charge d'affaires." By this provision the maximum of allowance only
was fixed, leaving the question as to any outfit, either in whole or in
part, to the discretion of the President, to be decided according to
circumstances. Under it a variety of cases occurred, in which outfits
having been given to diplomatic agents on their first appointment,
afterwards, upon their being transferred to other courts or sent upon
special and distinct missions, full or half outfits were again allowed.

This act, it will be perceived, although it fixes the maximum of outfit,
is altogether silent as to the circumstances under which outfits might
be allowed; indeed, the authority to allow them at all is not expressly
conveyed, but only incidentally adverted to in limiting the amount. This
limitation continued to be the only restriction upon the Executive until
1810, the act of 1790 having been kept in force till that period by five
successive reenactments, in which it is either referred to by means of
its title or its terms are repeated verbatim. In 1810 an act passed
wherein the phraseology which had been in use for twenty years is
departed from. Fixing the same limits precisely to the _amount_ of
salaries and outfits to ministers and charges as had been six times
fixed since 1790, it differs from preceding acts by formally conveying
an authority to allow an outfit to "a minister plenipotentiary or charge
d'affaires _on going from the United States to any foreign country_;"
and, in addition to this specification of the circumstances under which
the outfit may be allowed, it contains one of the conditions which shall
be requisite to entitle a charge or secretary to the compensation
therein provided.

Upon a view of all the circumstances connected with the subject I can
not permit myself to doubt that it was with reference to the practice of
multiplying outfits to the same person and in the intention of
prohibiting it in future that this act was