"Having fully spoken to every branch of your affairs at this Presidency, under their established heads, we cannot, consistently with the real anxiety we feel for the future welfare of that respectable body, for whom you and we are in trust, close this address without expostulating with freedom on the unprovoked and general asperity of your letter per the Prince Henry Packet. Our sentiments on this head will, we doubt not, acquire additional weight, from the consideration of their being subscribed by a majority of your Council; who are at this very period quitting your service, and consequently independent and disinterested. Permit us to say, that the diction of your letter is most unworthy yourselves and us, in whatever relation considered, either as masters to servants, or gentlemen to gentlemen. Mere inadvertencies and casual neglects arising from an unavoidable and most complicated confusion in the state of your affairs, have been treated in such language and sentiments, as nothing but the most glaring and premeditated faults could warrant. Groundless informations have, without further scrutiny, borne with you the stamp of truth, though proceeding from those who had therein obviously their own purpose to serve, no matter at whose expense. These have received from you such countenance and encouragement, as must assuredly tend to cool the warmest zeal of your servants here, and every where else, as they will appear to have been only the source of general reflections thrown out at random against your faithful servants of this Presidency, in various parts of your letter now before us—faithful to little purpose, if the breath of scandal, joined to private pique or private and personal attachments, have power to blow away in one hour the merits of many years' services, and deprive them of that rank and those rising benefits which are justly a spur to their integrity and application. The little attention shown to these considerations, in the indiscriminate favours heaped on some individuals, and undeserved censures on others, will, we apprehend, lessen that spirit of zeal so very essential to the well-being of your affairs, and consequently, in the end, if continued, prove the destruction of them. Private views may, it is much to be feared, take the lead here, from examples at home, and no gentlemen hold your service longer, nor exert themselves further in it, than their own exigencies require. This being the real state of your service, it becomes strictly our duty to represent it in the strongest light."[95]