Great Britain admits in her islands our vegetables, live provisions, horses, wood, tar, pitch, and turpentine, rice and bread-stuff, by a proclamation of her executive, limited always to the term of a year, but hitherto renewed from year to year. She prohibits our salted fish and other salted provisions. She does not permit our vessels to carry thither our own produce. Her vessels alone may take it from us, and bring in exchange, rum, molasses, sugar, coffee, cocoa-nuts, ginger, and pimento. There are, indeed, some freedoms in the island of Dominica, but under such circumstances as to be little used by us. In the British continental colonies, and in Newfoundland, all our productions are prohibited, and our vessels forbidden to enter their ports. Their Governors, however, in times of distress, have power to permit a temporary importation of certain articles in their own bottoms, but not in ours. Our citizens cannot reside as merchants or factors within any of the British plantations, this being expressly prohibited by the same statute of 12 Car. 2, c. 18, commonly called their navigation act. ***** Of our commercial objects, _Spain_ receives favorably our breadstuff, salted fish, wood, ships, tar, pitch, and turpentine. On our meals, however, when re-exported to their colonies, they have lately imposed duties, of from half a dollar to two dollars the barrel, the duties being so proportioned to the current price of their own flour, as that both together are to make the constant sum of nine dollars per barrel. They do not discourage our rice, pot and pearl ash, salted provisions, or whale-oil; but these articles, being in small demand at their markets, are carried thither but in a small degree. Their demand for rice, however, is increasing. Neither tobacco nor indigo are received there. Themselves and their colonies are the actual consumers of what they receive from us. Our navigation is free with the kingdom of Spain, foreign goods being received there in our ships on the same conditions as if carried in their own, or in the vessels of the country of which such goods are the manufacture or produce. Spain and Portugal refuse to those parts of America which they govern, all direct intercourse with any people but themselves. The commodities in mutual demand between them and their neighbors, must be carried to be exchanged in some port of the dominant country, and the transportation between that and the subject state must be in a domestic bottom. LETTER CXXXI.--TO MR. HAMMOND, February 16, 1793 TO MR. HAMMOND. Philadelphia, February 16, 1793.