“I think you then, so imprudent, so litigious and quarrelsome a man, even with your best friends, that peace and good order, and consequently the quiet and regular subordination so necessary to success, are, where you preside, impossible. These are within my observation and apprehension. Your military operations I leave to more capable judges. If, therefore, I had twenty ships of war, I should not give one of them to Captain Landais. The same temper which _excluded_ him from the French marine would weigh equally with me.” It was one important object of Captain Jones to get prisoners, that by an exchange he might release the American prisoners who were suffering the most barbarous treatment in the prisons of England. He carried with him into the Texel, five hundred British captives. Franklin proposed to the British government to exchange them for an equal number of Americans. But the ministry refused. They sent a large number of men-of-war to watch the channel, and cruise off the Texel, quite confident that they should be able to capture the prisoners as soon as any attempt was made to transport them to France. For some time they refused to exchange American prisoners on any terms. They would surrender the French captives alone, in return for the English. The sympathies of kind-hearted Captain Jones were deeply moved in behalf of the captive Americans. And yet his feelings would not allow him to retaliate in treating with inhumanity the British prisoners in his hands. They were generally poor and ignorant men. Not a few had been impressed into the service. They were not responsible for the cruelty of the government, over which they had no control. There was a large party in England totally opposed to this unrighteous war, and still more opposed to the barbarity with which the government was conducting it. When it was proposed and _carried_ in Parliament to employ the savages as the allies of Great Britain,—to hire the savages, with torch and tomahawk and scalping knife, in midnight assault, to burn the log-cabins and butcher the helpless women and children in their lonely homes, far away in the wilderness, hundreds of voices were raised in indignant remonstrance. The Earl of Chatham exclaimed, in the House of Lords, in one of the most eloquent and impassioned of addresses: “I am astonished, I am shocked, to hear such principles confessed; to hear them avowed in this house or in this country. Were I an American, as I am an Englishman, I would never lay down my arms—never, never never.”