r favorable attention to it, assured
that it will not be denied him, if it be consistent with the established
usage; and if inadmissible, praying that your Excellency will have the
goodness to give me as early an answer as the other arduous occupations
in which you are engaged, will admit, in order that he may know whether
he may see his creditors, or must return without. I am encouraged to
trouble your Excellency with this application, by the goodness with
which you have been pleased to attend to our interests on former
occasions, and by the desire of availing myself of every occasion of
proffering to you the homage of those sentiments of attachment and
respect, with which I have the honor to be your Excellency's most
obedient and most humble servant,

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER CLXXXV.--TO MR. CARNES, February 15,1789

TO MR. CARNES.

Paris, February 15,1789.

Sir,

I am now to acknowledge the receipt of your favors of January the 23rd,
and February the 9th and 10th. Your departure for America so soon,
puzzles me as to the finishing the affair of Schweighaeuser and Dobree,
in which I could have reposed myself on you. It remains, that I ask
you to recommend some person who may be perfectly relied on, in that
business. In fact, it is probably the only one I shall have occasion to
trouble them with before my own departure for America, which I expect
to take place in May; and I fix my return to Paris, in December. While
I ask your recommendation of a person to finish Dobree's business with
fidelity, I must ask your secrecy on the subject of that very business,
so as not to name it at all, even to the person you shall recommend.

With respect to the distressed American who needs one hundred and forty
livres to enable him to return to America, I have no authority to apply
any public monies to that purpose, and the calls of that nature are
so numerous, that I am obliged to refuse myself to them in my private
capacity. As to Captain Newell's case, you are sensible, that being
in the channel of the laws of the land, to ask a special order from
government, would expose us, in reciprocity to like demands from them
in America, to which our laws would never permit us to accede. Speaking
conscientiously, we must say it is wrong in any government to interrupt
the regular course of justice. A minister has no right to intermeddle
in a private suit, but when the laws of the country have been palpably
perverted to the preju