Many of these preliminary interviews took place in Paris. The amount of money and blood which the pugnacious government of England had expended in totally needless wars, can not be computed. The misery with which those wars had deluged this unhappy globe, God only can comprehend. Mr. Richard Oswald, a retired London merchant, of vast wealth, was sent, by Lord Shelburne, prime minister, as a confidential messenger, to sound Dr. Franklin. He was frank in the extreme. "Peace," said he, "is absolutely necessary for England. The nation has been foolishly involved in four wars, and can no longer raise money to carry them on. If continued, it will be absolutely necessary to stop the payment of interest money on the public debt." Mr. Adams and Mr. Jay were soon associated with Dr. Franklin in these negotiations. Mr. Jay was in entire sympathy with Mr. Adams in his antipathy to the French. They both assumed that France was meanly seeking only her own interests, making use of America simply as an instrument for the accomplishment of her selfish purposes.[36] [Footnote 36: Mr. Adams wrote, in his diary, November, 1782, "Mr. Jay don't like any Frenchman. The Marquis de la Fayette is clever, but he is a Frenchman."] Dr. Jared Sparks, after carefully examining, in the Office of Foreign Affairs in London, the correspondence of the French ministers with the American envoys, during the whole war, writes, "After examining the subject, with all the care and accuracy which these means of information have enabled me to give to it, I am prepared to express my belief, most fully, that Mr. Jay was mistaken, both in regard to the aims of the French court and the plans pursued by them to gain their supposed ends."[37] [Footnote 37: Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, V. viii, p. 209.] Mr. Jay was so insanely suspicious of the French, that he was afraid that the French ministry would send spies, to pick the locks in his lodgings, and steal his important papers. He therefore always carried them about his person. He also believed that Count de Vergennes had actually proposed to the British minister, that they should unite their armies, seize the United States, and divide America between them. Such were the colleagues united with Franklin, in the negotiations for peace. It required all his consummate wisdom to be able to guide affairs wisely under such difficult circumstances. It may be doubted whether there was another man in America, who could have surmounted the obstacles over which he triumphed. Both of Franklin's colleagues regarded him with suspicion. They believed that he had been won over to such sympathy with the French, that he would be willing to sacrifice the interests of his own country to please them. They wrote letters home severely denouncing him; and they seemed to stand more in fear of France than of England.