You have complained, sometimes with reason, of not hearing from your Foreign Ministers; we have had cause to make the same complaint, six full months having intervened between the latest date of your preceding letters and the receipt of those by Captain Barney. During all this time we were ignorant of the reception of the Provisional Treaty, and the sentiments of Congress upon it, which, if we had received sooner, might have forwarded the proceedings on the Definitive Treaty, and, perhaps, brought them to a conclusion, at a time more favorable than the present. But these occasional interruptions of correspondence are the inevitable consequences of a state of war, and of such remote situations. Barney had a short passage, and arrived some days before Colonel Ogden, who also brought despatches from you, all of which are come safe to hand. We, the Commissioners, have in our joint capacity written a letter to you, which you will receive with this. I shall now answer yours of March the 26th, May the 9th, and May the 31st. It gave me great pleasure to learn by the first, that the news of peace diffused general satisfaction. I will not now take it upon me to justify the apparent reserve, respecting this Court, at the signature, which you disapprove. We have touched upon it in our general letter. I do not see, however, that they have much reason to complain of that transaction. Nothing was stipulated to their prejudice, and none of the stipulations were to have force, but by a subsequent act of their own. I suppose, indeed, that they have not complained of it, or you would have sent us a copy of the complaint, that we might have answered it. I long since satisfied Count de Vergennes about it here. We did what appeared to all of us best at the time, and if we have done wrong, the Congress will do right, after hearing us, to censure us. Their nomination of five persons to the service seems to mark, that they had some dependence on our joint judgment, since one alone could have made a treaty by direction of the French Ministry as well as twenty. I will only add, that with respect to myself, neither the letter from M. Marbois, handed us through the British negotiators, (a suspicious channel) nor the conversations respecting the fishery, the boundaries, the royalists, &c. recommending moderation in our demands, are of weight sufficient in my mind to fix an opinion, that this Court wished to restrain us, in obtaining any degree of advantage we could prevail on our enemies to accord, since those discourses are fairly resolvable, by supposing a very natural apprehension, that we, relying too much on the ability of France to continue the war in our favor, and supply us constantly with money, might insist on more advantages than the English would be willing to grant, and thereby lose the opportunity of making peace, so necessary to all our friends.