while the principal, and interest preceding and subsequent to the war,
seem justly due from us, that which accrued during the war does not.
Interest is a compensation for the use of money. Their money, in our
hands, was in the form of lands and negroes. Tobacco, the produce of
these lands and negroes (or, as I may call it, the interest for them),
being almost impossible of conveyance to the markets of consumption,
because taken by themselves in its way there, sold during the war at
five or six shillings the hundred. This did not pay taxes, and for
tools, and other plantation charges. A man who should have attempted to
remit to his creditor tobacco, for either principal or interest, must
have remitted it three times before one cargo would have arrived safe:
and this from the depredations of their own nation, and often of the
creditor himself; for some of the merchants entered deeply into the
privateering business. The individuals who did not, say they have lost
this interest: the debtor replies, that he has not gained it, and that
it is a case where, a loss having been incurred, every one tries to
shift it from himself. The known bias of the human mind from motives of
interest should lessen the confidence of each party in the justice of
their reasoning: but it is difficult to say, which of them should
make the sacrifice, both of reason and interest. Our conferences were
intended as preparatory to some arrangement. It is uncertain how far
we should have been able to accommodate our opinions. But the absolute
aversion of the government to enter into any arrangement prevented the
object from being pursued. Each country is left to do justice to itself
and to the other, according to its own ideas as to what is past; and to
scramble for the future as well as they can: to regulate their commerce
by duties and prohibitions, and perhaps by cannons and mortars; in which
event, we must abandon the ocean, where we are weak, leaving to neutral
nations the carriage of our commodities; and measure with them on land,
where they alone can lose. Farewell, then, all our useful improvements