In the circumstances of the case, and after the restoration of the surviving officer by his superiors, it is very mild language to call this suspension an act of very doubtful justice. And it is most certain, that an act of authority so harsh, and of such doubtful justice, against officers who had such a fair appearance of mere military obedience, and whose very fault, if they had one, must have sprung from a zeal for military privileges, was of a nature to vibrate through every nerve of an army. When the Government once did an act which made two officers of rank at least appear to suffer unjustly for the army, they entirely changed the character of the disputes. They drove the generosity, honour, and justice of the army into rebellion. They supplied the discontented with the colour of right, without which no leaders are ever able to seduce multitudes to resistance. They exalted pecuniary grievances into the feelings of generous sympathy and wounded honour. They made it be thought disgraceful to abstain from taking a part in a combination to prevent injustice. The moderate, the disinterested, the loyal, even the timid and circumspect, were forced into opposition,--by shame, by fear, by sympathy, by that tumultuous combination of causes, generous and mean, which recruit the ranks of insurgents, and change the murmurs of a few into the mutinous clamour of the many. Whatever the evil intentions of a few may be, it is always an act of real or supposed injustice which throws the multitude into the hands of the ill-affected leaders. Before the suspension there existed only discontents; after it, general disaffection, conspiracy, and sedition. The necessity of vesting the power of dismissing or suspending officers in the Government will never be questioned by thinking men: but when it is considered, that the operation of the general orders of the 1st of May was, considering the rank and number of the suspended officers, not a much less exertion of authority than if his Majesty were to strike a tenth part of his general officers out of the list of the army, it will not be wondered that this example of the precarious and degraded tenure by which military rank was held, should have diffused universal dismay, and reinforced resentment by despair. The dispassionate observer, after remarking with wonder that every expedient was omitted or rejected which could detach the misguided from the ill-affected, or open a creditable retreat for the penitent, will pause before the sword was drawn, to consider whether general submission would then have been too dearly purchased by an amnesty which should not have excluded from hope even the officers suspended on the 1st of May.