Imagination is sometimes a very valuable quality in practical affairs, and this neat description by the man of letters was actually carried out in every detail and with complete success by his agent in America. He was certainly a valuable ambassador of the colonies, this wonderful Beaumarchais; but he suffered severely for his devotion. Under his agreement with his government, the government’s outlay was to be paid back gradually by American produce; but Congress would not send the produce, or sent it so slowly that Beaumarchais was threatened with ruin, and suffered the torturing anxiety which comes with the conviction that those for whom you are making the greatest sacrifices are indifferent and incapable of gratitude. It was in vain that he appealed to Congress; for Arthur Lee was continually informing that body that he was a fraud and his claims groundless, because the French government intended that all the supplies sent through Hortalez & Co. should be a free gift to the revolted colonies. Lee may have sincerely believed this; but it was very unfortunate, because more than two years elapsed before Congress became convinced that the supplies were not entirely a present, and voted Beaumarchais its thanks and some of the money he claimed. A large part of his claims were never paid. For fifty years there was a controversy about “the lost million,” and for its romantic history the reader is referred to De Loménie, Durand’s “New Material for the History of the American Revolution,” and Dr. Stillé’s “Beaumarchais and the Lost Million.” But he was not the only person who suffered. The truth is that the whole arrangement made by Congress for conducting the business in France was ridiculously inefficient, not to say cruel and inhuman. That we got most important aid from France was due to the eagerness and efforts of the French themselves, and not to anything done by Congress.