The Recorder

The following passage is copied from Smith's National Intelligencer:---

" There is now due the Regency of Algiers no more than one year's annuity, equal to 12,000 sequins, or 21,600 dollars. in addition to the expence of ransoming captain Morris and his crew, said to amount to 6,500 dollars, and about the sum of 4 or 5000 dollars for contingencies. Of all these sums the first alone is known to be due the regency, and it is not believed that the United States are in arrear even to individuals for the rest.

" The treaty, with Algiers stipulates, that the annuity shall be paid in marine stores. Owing to the difficulty of obtaining and transporting the articles punctually and to the public advantage, an attempt has been made to vary the payment into cash. . .This succeeded for the annuity last paid; and it was presumed that it would have been equally acceptable for the one which is in arrear: accordingly 30,000 dollars were received by Mr. O'Brien out of one of the public ships in November last, to pay the annuity if accepted in money, and to answer other pecuniary calls which might arise. It is to be observed that the annuity became due only the month before."

According to the table of coins printed at the end of the American edition of Guthrie's Geography, twelve thousand sequins come to twenty-three thousand and eight hundred dollars. But this is the smallest of the mistakes which occur in the above extract. Instead of twenty-one thousand six hundred dollars, the tribute has actually amounted to seventy two, and at length to eighty thousand dollars. Mr. Smith must have been perfectly acquainted with this, and hence the statement must have been made only with a deliberate purpose of deception. The real state of the case was briefly this.

Twelve thousand sequins were stipulated as a tribute by the Dey of Algiers. But this sum was to be paid in military and naval stores, which the Dey wanted much more than he did to money.---Our agent, Donaldson, agreed with him upon a specific list of stores at certain prices, and in this list, the articles were upon a medium, set down at only one third part of their real value. Gunpowder for instance, was to be rated at half a dollar per pound, when behold! it could not be had in Philadelphia for less than a dollar and a half. All the rest of the prices ran in the same style. Smith may see an account of it in a printed report given in by Mr. Wolcott to Congress.

So the consequence was that, with regard to the first two years of the Algerine tribute, instead of forty-eight thousand dollars they found it necessary to vote one hundred and forty four thousand, because it proved impossible to purchase the specified stores for a smaller sum. Callender was the first who let this cat out of the bag; for although it was extant, in Mr. Wolcott's printed report, and the statute of appropriation into it among the acts of congress, yet the facts were universally unknown. No body reads congress reports, and the statute was so artfully worded, that one could never discover from it that the Algerine tribute was connected with the 144000 dollars. In Spring, 1800, Mr. Wolcott, in his estimate of expenses to lay before congress, stated eighty thousand dollars, for the purchase of the treaty for the United States. The Dey might from over-sights, and accept a sum of money instead of three times its value. In naval and military stores. He would speedily perceive the difference. And while it is certain that the tribute has annually cost from seventy-two to eighty thousand dollars, it is an imposition upon the public—it is cutting truth through the middle, to tell us, that the tribute was only twenty-one thousand six hundred dollars.

End of extract from the National Intelligencer.