Mr Williams has at length given in his accounts, from which it appears, that upwards of forty thousand suits of the soldiers’ clothes ordered, and twenty thousand fusils, have been sent from Nantes and Bordeaux; and the present exhausted state of our finances will not permit us to fulfil them further. The ships of war sent hither are an enormous expense to us; hardly any of them less than 100,000 livres, and things have been hitherto so managed, that their prizes produce us little or nothing. This seems to have arisen from the variety of agents employed, the confusion of their provinces, and the loose manner in which the public accounts have been kept. To remedy this, we have to simplify the business of expenditure, by directing the whole to be discharged by the two deputy commercial agents appointed by my brother, in the interval of his negotiation in Germany. By this we expect to avoid the infinite impositions arising from a connexion with a multiplicity of merchants, many of whom, supposing us to know no better, will endeavor to deceive us. They, as merchants, know how to check the others, and are themselves ultimately responsible to us. I have the honor to be, &c. ARTHUR LEE. TO COUNT DE VERGENNES. Chaillot, June 14th, 1778. Sir, It was with great pleasure I heard the explanation, which your Excellency did me the honor to give me yesterday relative to the 12th article of the Commercial Treaty; that it was meant to comprehend only provisions, and not the whole of our exports to his Majesty’s Islands, and that _denrées_, the word employed, signifies eatables, not merchandise. It relieved the apprehensions I had entertained, that the having set in that article the whole of our produce against one of your productions would seem unequal, would therefore give uneasiness in Congress, and prevent that unanimity in their approbation of the treaty, which the wise and liberal principles on which it is planned deserve; and which I most sincerely wished it might receive. Upon referring, however, to the words of the treaty, I find they are _denrées et marchandise_, so that the words appear, by I know not what accident, to have been different from, and to mean more than you intended. I lament extremely that nothing of this explanation passed in our conference and correspondence with M. Gerard on this and the preceding article. Yet I am not without hope, that Congress will rather trust to the equity of your Court for reducing the article to its intended equality, than gratify our enemies by an appearance of dissension in ratifying the treaties.