of the duties of that friendship with which you have ever honoured me that I have stated my sentiments so freely upon this subject. I am very intimately acquainted with a great number of the officers of whom I speak: some of them would, I am certain, have given their lives for Government at the very moment they refused to give a pledge which they thought, from the mode in which it was proposed, reflected upon their honour; and others, who had unfortunately gone to a certain extent in the late culpable and unmilitary proceedings, but who viewed the criminal excesses of some of their brother officers with undisguised horror and indignation, would, I am assured, if it had been possible for Government to have pardoned what was past, and to have expressed, in indulgent language, its kind intentions for the future, have been the most forward in their efforts to punish those who, by an unwarrantable perseverance in a guilty career, merited all the wrath of the state: but, unfortunately, (though such an intention, I am assured, never entered into your mind,) an almost general sentiment prevailed, that it was meant the service should be destroyed by the first blow, and that all were therefore included in one general mass, as just objects of suspicion and disgrace. "I am far from defending such an interpretation of this measure of Government; I have only stated what I consider to be the fact, and explained, as far as I could, those causes by which I believe it to have been produced: their operation is, I fear, now almost irremediable, and events must take their course. I know (and my personal conduct has proved it,) that my brother officers are deeply wrong; and I am quite heart-broken when I reflect on the consequences to themselves and country which the guilt of some of them is likely to produce. I need not assure you of my sincere happiness at the success which has hitherto attended the execution of the measure you have adopted, and I anxiously hope it may meet with no opposition. I have never doubted the success of this measure, if it was resorted to, as far as related to the accomplishment of its immediate object; and I most earnestly pray that my judgment may have deceived me with regard to the collateral and remote consequences by which I have always deemed it likely to be attended."