You offer, as your excuse for not returning to your country, during our war with England, that you had not been invited home by the then Secretary, notwithstanding you had written him, expressive of your wishes to be employed. You state, that, if you "had received the slightest intimation from the department, that you would have been employed on your return, you would have considered no sacrifice too great, no exertion within your power should have been omitted to obtain so desirable an object." From this, I would infer, that, in consequence of not receiving this intimation, you did not make the exertions in your power to return, and this I hold to be an insufficient excuse. You do not pretend to have made any attempt, except by the way of the cartel, the John Adams. You cannot believe, that reporting yourself to the Department, at the distance of 4000 miles, when the same conveyance which brought your letter would have brought yourself, will be received as evincing sufficient zeal to join the arms of your country; and besides, you say it was not believed, for a considerable time after the news of war arrived in Denmark, that the war would last six months. With those impressions, you must have known, that it would have occupied at least that time for your letter to have arrived at the Department, you to receive an answer, and then to repair to America. You deny that the opportunities of returning were frequent. The custom house entries at Baltimore and New York alone, from the single port of Bordeaux, will show nearly an hundred arrivals; and it is well known, that it required only a few days to perform the journey from Copenhagen to Bordeaux, by the ordinary course of post. You deny having been advised to return to this country, by your friends, during the war. Mr. Cook, of Norfolk, your relative, says he wrote to you to that effect; and Mr. Forbes, then our consul at Copenhagen, who is now at this place, says he urged you in person to do so. You have charged the officers who concur with me in opinion respecting your claims to service, as being my satellites. I think I am not mistaken, when I inform you, that all the officers of our grade, your superiors as well as inferiors, with the exception of one who is your junior concur in the opinion, that you ought not to be employed again, whilst the imputations, which now lie against you, remain; nor have they been less backward than myself in expressing their opinions.