No. 250.
Mr. Evarts to Mr. Outrey.
Washington, March 25, 1880.
Sir: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your note of the 22d instant, wherein you recur to the statements you had previously made to me, and now repeat, that the French Government had from the outset expressed the firm purpose to leave to the enterprise inaugurated by Mr. de Lesseps for the construction of a canal through the Isthmus of Panama its entirely private character.
I notice also that you observe that even if you have sympathies for the conceptions of your distinguished fellow-citizen, the French Government, as you have heretofore said to me, is absolutely a stranger to the enterprise, and does not intend to participate therein in any manner, nor to give it any support, direct or indirect.
In reply, I have the honor to assure you that I have at all times received these statements with an entire confidence in the open sincerity and absolute good faith of the Government of France in making them, and am happy to find in this renewed and more formal representation now made a complete conformity with the repeated assurances heretofore given me in the name and by the authority of your government. Accept, &c.,