between the naval and merchant
services, because all the Americans were "detained under commitments
from some magistrate, as for high treason."

July 13, 1778, Franklin remitted to Hartley the lists of English
prisoners. September 14 he recurs again to the general release: "You
have not mentioned whether the proposition of sending us the whole of
those in your prisons was agreed to. If it is, you may rely on our
sending immediately all that come to our hands for the future; or we
will give you, [at] your option, an order for the balance to be
delivered to your fleet in America. By putting a little confidence in
one another, we may thus diminish the miseries of war." Five days later
he took a still more romantic position: heretofore, he said, the
American commissioners had encouraged and aided the American prisoners
to try to escape; "but if the British government should honorably keep
their agreement to make regular exchanges, we shall not think it
consistent with the honor of the United States to encourage such
escapes, or to give any assistance to such as shall escape."

Yet at the same time he showed himself fully able to conduct business
according to the usual commonplace method. This same letter closes with
a threat under the _lex talionis_: "We have now obtained permission of
this government to put all British prisoners, whether taken by
continental frigates or by privateers, into the king's prisons; and we
are determined to treat such prisoners precisely as our countrymen are
treated in England, to give them the same allowance of provisions and
accommodations, and no other." He was long obliged to reiterate the like
menaces.[48]

[Note 48: Hale's _Franklin in France_, i. 352.]

October 20, 1778, he reverts to his favorite project: "I wish their
lordships could have seen it well to exchange upon account; but though
they may not think it safe trusting to us, we shall make no difficulty
in trusting to them;" and he proposes that, if the English will "send us
over 250 of our people, we will deliver all we have in France;" if these
be less than two hundred and fifty, the English may take back the
surplus Americans; but if these be more than two hundred and fifty,
Franklin says that he will nevertheless deliver them all in expectation
that he will receive back an equivalent for the surplus. "We would thus
wish to commence, by this first advance, that mutual confidence which it
would be for the good of mankind that