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[Page 6]
"you not urged from motives foreign to the general interest of the colony. Can you say with a clear conscience that you have taken no advantage of His Excellency's former misfortunes? You call yourself the Lieutenant Governor without having produced your commission. Do you suppose that being placed by accident, as the next officer in rank to His Excellency entitles you to make use of the appellations? Look again, and see if there is no vacance between your rank and His Excellency's which belongs to the Lieutenant Governor. In my way of judging, you would have been no more than Commandant had the command legally decended to you. You have not been content with dispossessing the Governor, but have dismissed other officers, and subverted the government, in some instances, apparently on purpose for your partisans to accumulate wealth. If my information is good, you have acknowledged yourself incapable of administering the government; and what was published in your circular letter almost confirms it, by pointing out the Colonial secretary as the fittest person to be found for managing the public affairs
Should you expect to reap great advantages from the petitions or addresses, which have been handed about in your favor, you will be mistaken, for on a scrutiny it will be found, the signatures may be reduced to several classes, both voluntarily and compulsory. They who signed the one for to arrest the Governor, instead of rendering you any support, have criminated themselves. Before this unfortunate circumstance took place, I always understood you to be a well-disposed good natured man; a cheerful companion; and an idol of the soldiers, and the lower order of society, Being thus esteemed, you have led numbers astray in suffering yourself to be imposed upon in sharing the same fate. The manner in which you besieged Government House on the 26 of January, will be a sarcasm upon the New South Wales Corps to an unknown generation. You have taken upon yourself to be answerable for your conduct; but the forfeiting the most valuable acquisition you are possessed of, will not be an atonement for every individual whom you have injured. What I have said respecting you is only sanity and compassion, to what I would have done, had not you been made the instrument for answering another's vanity. Brutus"
"The man who has been the occasion of all this mischief and commotion, is John McArthur Esq, late a captain in the New South Wales Corps. It appears you have some knowledge of him, (though I do not think he is personally known to you) and must have nettled him when he was in England, from the animosity he bears you. He has circulated a report, that you are an old debauched character; and that if you interfere in the present business, he will soon cut you down. Such talk may serve to amuse his converts, at the risk of self conviction. I am informed he said, there would be my dispatches, but he should keep a sharp look out after me; and that he would take away my men. As I have not had any connections with him, I am at a