The great disparity between the number of the French prisoners in Britain and the British in France must have strongly influenced the First Consul to issue the Edict, which cancelled without ceremony the arrangement in force for the two years 1798–99. A return made in December 1799, when our Government again took over the victualling of the French prisoners, showed their number to be 25,646, of whom 10,128 were at Portsmouth, 7,477 at Forton (Portsmouth), 3,038 at Norman Cross, and the rest in Liverpool, Chatham, Stapleton, Edinburgh, and Yarmouth. The number of English in France was about 5,000. The French therefore, during 1798 and 1799, were feeding and clothing 25,646, while the British had to feed and clothe only a little over 5,000. This disparity in the number of the captives of France and England lasted throughout the war, and, as will be seen, interfered seriously with the exchange of prisoners. With the resumption of the old arrangement, there came again the old complaints; that those of the British were in some degree justified, is clear from words of explanation used by the French Commissary, “_If the situation of the Finances of the Republic did not allow of the prisoners receiving the whole of what the law allowed them_, it was not the less true that they experienced in that respect the benefits of the solicitude of the Government.” The words in italics practically concede the fact that the British prisoners in France were not receiving what the law allowed them. The French never lost sight of the hope, by one means or another, of getting the prisoners back into the fighting ranks, and when in answer to a complaint of the French, M. Otto the commissary had been told “That the people here are not better fed than the prisoners,” his retort in writing to the Transport Commissioners was, “If the scarcity of Provisions is so notorious that the Government [British], notwithstanding its solicitude, cannot relieve the wants of its own people, why should it unnecessarily increase the consumption by feeding more than 22,000 prisoners?” M. Otto’s solution of all the difficulties was, send us back our soldiers and sailors, and cease to burden yourselves with them. It may be difficult, even after this long lapse of time, for either a Frenchman or an Englishman to make an impartial summing up of a controversy carried on in hot blood and generating bad feeling which lasted long after Waterloo and the return of the Bourbons. The British did not shrink from publishing at the time all the facts and correspondence relating to these controversial matters, thus enabling their contemporaries of all nationalities to come to a right judgment and, fortunately for us, if exaggerated and even lying accusations came from French sources, their exaggeration and falsehood could usually be proved by French witnesses. The piteous letter of M. Charretie has been already quoted as evidence of where the fault really lay in November 1797.