You say you have been oppressed. You know, sir, that, by absenting yourself, as you did for years, from the country, without leave from the government, you subjected yourself to be stricken from the rolls. You know, also, that, by the 10th article of the act for the better government of the Navy, all persons in the Navy holding intercourse with an enemy, become subject to the severest punishment known to our laws. You have not, for the offences before stated, to my knowledge, received even a reprimand; and I do know, that your pay, even during your absence, has been continued to you. As to my having spoken of you injuriously to "junior officers," I have to remark, that such is the state of our service that we have but few seniors. If I speak with officers at all, the probability is, it will be with a junior. On your return to this country, your efforts to re-establish yourself in the service were known, and became a subject of conversation with officers as well as others. In the many and _free_ conversations I have had respecting you and your conduct, I have said, for the causes above enumerated, that, in my opinion, you ought not to be received again into the naval service; that there was not employment for all the officers who had faithfully discharged their duty to their country in the hour of trial; and that it would be doing an act of injustice to employ you, to the exclusion of any one of them. In speaking thus, and endeavoring to prevent your re-admission, I conceive that I was performing a duty I owe to the service; that I was contributing to the preservation of its respectability. Had you have made no effort to be re-employed, after the war, it is more than probable I might not have spoken of you. If you continue your efforts, I shall certainly, from the same feelings of public duty by which I have hitherto been actuated, be constrained to continue the expression of my opinions; and I can assure you, that, in the interchange of opinions with other officers respecting you, I have never met with more than one who did not entirely concur with me. The objects of your communication of the 23d, as expressed by you, now claim my notice. You profess to consider me as having given you "an invitation." You say that you have been told, that I have "tauntingly and boastingly observed, that I would cheerfully meet you in the field, and hoped you would yet act like a man." One would naturally have supposed, that, after having been so recently led into an error by "rumors" which could not be traced, you would have received, with some caution, subsequent rumors; at all events that you would have endeavored to have traced them, before again venturing to act upon them as if they were true. Had you have pursued this course, you would have discovered, that the latter rumors were equally unfounded as the former.