Mr. N. said he would inquire into the rights of France as they respected three principal subjects, which were more particularly causes of complaint between the two countries. These were, the right of our vessels carrying English goods, the article respecting contraband goods, and that respecting the carrying of provisions. He knew no better way to determine how far we could support those articles of the British Treaty, than by extracting the arguments of our own ministerial characters in support of these measures. With respect to the question of free ships making free goods, his impressions were very different from those of the Secretary of State. He says, with respect to the regulation of free ships making free goods, it is not changing a right under the law of nations; that it had never been pretended to be a right, and that our having agreed to it in one instance, and not in another, was no just cause of complaint by the French Government. He advocates this transaction in his letter to Mr. Adet last winter. Mr. N. said, he knew not what was the origin of the law of nations upon the subject; he knew not how it came into existence; it had never been settled by any convention of nations. Perhaps, however, the point now under consideration came as near to a fixed principle, as any other of what are called the laws of nations ever did, as only one nation in Europe could be excepted from the general understanding of it. Mr. Pickering, he thought, seemed not to have given full force to this circumstance, but seemed to have weakened the evidence. [He referred to what Mr. Pickering had said upon the subject.] It was Mr. Pickering's idea, that the stipulation of free ships making free goods, was a mere temporary provision; that it was not an article in the law of nations, but a new principle introduced by the contracting parties. In order to prove this was not the case, Mr. N. referred to the provisions entered into by the armed neutrality of the north of Europe; to a treaty between France and Spain; to a note from the Court of Denmark; and to the declaration of the United States themselves on the subject. With respect to contraband articles, he had little to say. It was asserted that the articles stipulated in the British Treaty as contraband, were made so by the law of nations. Where the doctrine was found he could not say. It had been quoted from _Vattel_; this authority might be correct; but he never found any two writers on this subject agree as to this article. In a late publication on the law of nations (_Marten's_) he found it directly asserted that naval stores were not contraband. But he said, if the contrary were the law of nations, they were bound to extend the same privilege to France which they gave to England: they could not have one rule for the one nation, and a different one for the other.