ue, to be minister
plenipotentiary of the United States to the French Republic.

If the Senate shall advise and consent to his appointment, effectual
care shall be taken in his instructions that he shall not go to France
without direct and unequivocal assurances from the French Government,
signified by their minister of foreign relations, that he shall be
received in character, shall enjoy the privileges attached to his
character by the law of nations, and that a minister of equal rank,
title, and powers shall be appointed to treat with him, to discuss and
conclude all controversies between the two Republics by a new treaty.

JOHN ADAMS.

[Translation.]

PARIS, _the 7th Vendemiaire of the 7th Year
of the French Republic, One and Indivisible_.

_The Minister of Exterior Relations to Citizen Pichon, Secretary of
Legation of the French Republic near the Batavian Republic_:

I have received successively, Citizen, your letters of the 22d and 27th
Fructidor [8th and 13th September]. They afford me more and more reason
to be pleased with the measure you have adopted, to detail to me your
conversations with Mr. Murray. These conversations, at first merely
friendly, have acquired consistency by the sanction I have given to them
by my letter of the 11th Fructidor. I do not regret that you have
trusted to Mr. Murray's honor a copy of my letter. It was intended for
you only, and contains nothing but what is conformable to the intentions
of Government. I am thoroughly convinced that should explanations take
place with confidence between the two Cabinets, irritation would cease,
a crowd of misunderstandings would disappear, and the ties of friendship
would be the more strongly united as each party would discover the hand
which sought to disunite them. But I will not conceal from you that your
letters of the 2d and 3d Vendemiaire, just received, surprised me much.
What Mr. Murray is still dubious of has been very explicitly declared,
even before the President's message to Congress of the 3d Messidor [21st
June] last was known in France. I had written it to Mr. Gerry, namely,
on the 24th Messidor and 4th Thermidor; I did repeat it to him before he
sat out. A whole paragraph of my letter to you of the 11th Fructidor, of
which Mr. Murray has a copy, is devoted to develop still more the fixed
determination of the French Government. According to these bases, you
were right to assert that whatever plenipotentiary the Government