The American plenipotentiaries, while professing to be free from “apprehension of an unfavorable _balance_,” protested against the consideration of any “national” claims until some “convenient stage of the negotiation, after it shall be seen what arrangement would be acceptable for _the claims of citizens_.”[143] The French plenipotentiaries rejoined by enforcing “national” as well as “individual” claims.[144] The issue seemed to be made. On the one side were the “individual” claims of American citizens, on the other side the “national” claims of France. The American plenipotentiaries were not authorized to recognize the “national” claims alone. The French plenipotentiaries were not authorized to recognize the “individual” claims, without a previous recognition on our part of the “national” claims. At last, after various efforts at harmony, it was officially announced that “the negotiation was at a stand on the part of France,” as her plenipotentiaries were constrained by instructions of the First Consul to make “the acknowledgment of former treaties the basis of negotiation _and the condition of compensation_.”[145] The First Consul was then on the Italian slope of the Alps, about to pounce upon the astonished Austrians. Claims and counter claims were of little concern to him. Thus far the Committee have exhibited our claims in their origin and history. The time has come to change the scene, and to exhibit those counter claims which played such part in the successive negotiations, and finally produced that memorable _dead-lock_, when the two powers stood face to face with antagonist pretensions, unable to go forward, and unwilling to go backward. II. COUNTER CLAIMS OF FRANCE, THEIR ORIGIN AND HISTORY. The counter claims of France differ widely from the claims of American citizens. They were not “individual,” but “national,” being founded on alleged violations of treaty stipulations assumed by the United States in return for the aid of France in the establishment of national independence. During the protracted controversy between the two republics they were detailed in numerous official notes; but they were brandished by Talleyrand, with offensive skill and effect, in the very faces of our insulted plenipotentiaries, under date of March 18, 1798, when, while driving them from Paris, he insisted “_that the priority of grievances and complaints belonged to the French Republic_,” and “that these complaints and these grievances were as real as numerous, long before the United States had the least grounded claim to make.”[146] Careful inquiry enables us to see that this allegation, thus confidently uttered, was not without a certain foundation; and here we revert to the history of our country.