ays
attached to business of a confidential nature, such as was the
business I related to you. I recollect asking whether he had
showed the paper to you: he said No; but did not add any
injunction to me not to do so; indeed, if he had, I should have
stated to him the impossibility of my keeping from you a
circumstance of that importance, or of my becoming, by my
silence in it, a separate party to a business which it was my
duty fully and entirely to lay before you and to receive from
you; nor indeed at this moment is the knowledge of it confined
to Lord Shelburne; as I am pretty sure Oswald told me that Lord
Ashburton was with Lord Shelburne when he, Oswald, asked if he
might give any answer to Franklin about the paper, or rather
observed that he supposed he could not then have any answer to
it. Under these circumstances, the difficulty with regard to the
Canada paper, of which I have no copy, lies more possibly in the
indelicacy and perhaps bad policy of bringing forward Franklin
where he wished so much not to appear, than in the quoting it
from me. I do not wish to be quoted, if there exists the least
doubt whether I should. But I cannot more exactly explain to you
the whole extent of that doubt, than by showing you that it does
not exist in any specific obligation on my part, but only in the
nature of what was told to me; the subject itself carrying with
it, as you will see, many reasons for secrecy, and every mark of
it in the manner of conducting it; but as to positive engagement
or obligation upon this subject, I have none.

The remaining circumstance--of the intention mentioned to Mr.
Oswald by Lord Shelburne, of giving him a commission if it
should be necessary--stands altogether clear of the slightest
shade of difficulty upon the point of confidence; indeed, at the
time I wrote you word of it, I did not imagine I was informing
you of anything new or unknown to you; and only so far meant to
dwell upon it, as to regret its happening precisely at the
instant when it was most important it should not. I apprehended
that Lord Shelburne might have already expressed such an
intention to the rest of the King's Ministers, upon the ground
of the American share of this business, which ground, in the
present stage of it, I thought possibly you had not found it
easy to objec