If they avoid your company and conversation, it is a more unfavorable symptom than any you have mentioned; and shows clearly that your public character should have been concealed till your address had paved the way for its being acknowledged. If you have formed connexions with any of these people, and I cannot but presume that you have attended to so important a point, it will be very interesting to us to have their most striking features delineated, their sentiments with respect to us and to our opponents detailed, and the influence of each in the Assembly of the States. This will best acquaint us with the principles of the government, and direct our course towards them. Among other things, I wish to know in what light they view our cause, as just or unjust? What influence they imagine our independence will have upon the general system of Europe, or their own States? What expectations they form from our commerce; whether the apprehension of its being altogether thrown into another channel, if infused with address, would not awaken them into action? What are their ideas of the comparative power of France and Britain, so far as it may affect them? Whether they have entered into any treaty with France since the war; if they have, what are its objects? If they have not, whether any such thing is in contemplation? None of your letters takes the least notice of the French Ambassador at the Hague; is there no intercourse between you? If not, to what is it to be attributed? It appears to me, that our interests in Holland are similar to those of France. They are interested with us in forwarding our loans; in procuring a public acknowledgment of our independence; in urging the States to exertion. They have considerable influence on the government, as appears from the success that the loan, opened under their guarantee met with. I must again, therefore, request you to spend much of your time at the Hague, that great centre of politics, to cultivate the acquaintance and friendship of the French Ambassador, to confer with him freely and candidly upon the state of our affairs; and by his means, to extend your acquaintance to the other representatives of crowned heads at the Hague. Your having no public character, together with our avowed contempt for rank and idle ceremony, will greatly facilitate your intercourse with them, and enable you to efface the ill impressions they daily receive of us from our enemies.