missions usually called
letters of marque. She arrived here safely without having had any
reencounter of any sort. Can it be necessary to say that a merchant
vessel is not a privateer? That though she has arms to defend herself in
time of war, in the course of her regular commerce, this no more makes
her a privateer, than a husbandman following his plough in time of war,
with a knife or pistol in his pocket, is thereby made a soldier? The
occupation of a privateer is attack and plunder, that of a merchant
vessel is commerce and self-preservation. The article excludes the
former from our ports, and from selling what she has taken, that is what
she has acquired by war, to show it did not mean the merchant vessel and
what she had acquired by commerce. Were the merchant vessels coming
for our produce forbidden to have any arms for their defence, every
adventurer who had a boat, or money enough to buy one, would make her a
privateer, our coasts would swarm with them, foreign vessels must cease
to come, our commerce must be suppressed, our produce remain on our
hands, or at least that great portion of it which we have not vessels to
carry away, our ploughs must be laid aside, and agriculture suspended.
This is a sacrifice no treaty could ever contemplate, and which we are
not disposed to make out of mere complaisance to a false definition of
the term privateer. Finding that the Jane had purchased new carriages to
mount two or three additional guns, which she had brought in her hold,
and that she had opened additional port-holes for them, the carriages
were ordered to be relanded, the additional port-holes stopped, and her
means of defence reduced, to be exactly the same at her departure as at
her arrival. This was done on the general principle of allowing no party
to arm within our ports.

4. The seventeenth article of our treaty leaves armed vessels free to
conduct, whithersoever they please, the ships and goods taken from their
enemies without paying any duty, and to depart and be conducted freely
to the places expressed in their commissions, which the captain shall be
obliged to show. It is evident, that this article does not contemplate
a freedom to sell their prizes here; but on the contrary, a departure
to some other place, always to be expressed in their commission, where
their validity is to be finally adjudged. In such case, it would be as
unreasonable to demand duties on the goods they had taken from an enemy,
as it