entertain a
doubt, that open accusation, prompt trial, unsuspected justice, and
speedy punishment, if merited, are essential to the good government of
a naval service? Nay, is it possible that your excellency should not
know that the system of government in the naval service of Portugal is
the most wretched in the world, and consequently the last that ought
to have been adopted for the naval service of Brazil?

And here I would respectfully ask your excellency whether you know of
any one thing recommended by me for the benefit of the naval service
being complied with? Have the laws been revised to adapt them to the
better government of the service? Has a corps of marine artillery
been formed and taught their duty? Have young gentlemen intended for
officers been sent on board to learn their profession? Have young men
been enlisted and sent on board to be bred up as seamen? Or has
any encouragement been given to the employment of Brazilians in the
commerce of the coast?[A]

[Footnote A: It was the policy of Portugal to navigate the
coasting-trade of Brazil by slaves; and that of Spain to allow none
but Indians to exercise the trade of fishermen on the shores of their
South American colonies.]

With regard to those difficulties, delays, and other impediments of
which I have complained as existing in the arsenal and other offices,
and which your excellency supposes me to have represented as being
caused, or at least tolerated, by the minister, and which you are
pleased to characterise as "tout a fait imaginaires, et n'ayant
d'outre source que l'ambition sordide de quelque intrigant," I shall
not now enter into them again at any length, as much that I have
already written tends to refute your excellency's notions on the
subject. That such abuses do really exist I have proved beyond the
power of contradiction; and that they are at least tolerated by
those--whoever they may be--who possess without exercising the means
of preventing, does not require the ingenuity of an "intrigant" to
discover, as the fact is self-evident. I cannot, therefore, admit that
either my complaints or suspicions are "tout a fait imaginaires,"
or that they are "des petitesses," as your excellency is pleased
contemptuously to term them; but whatever they are, they originate in
my own observation, without any assistance from the spectacles of
an "intrigant," with which I am so gratuitously accommodated by your
excellency.

In still further proof,