present, have been communicated to us by respectable persons, who have
warranted their authenticity. We shall, besides, advance nothing which
cannot be proved.

Here, we hear some voices ask, what right we have to make known to the
government, men who are, perhaps, guilty, but whom their places, and their
rank, entitle to more respect. They are ready to make it a crime in us,
that we have dared to say, that officers of the marine had abandoned us.
But what interest, we ask, in our turn, should cause a fatal indulgence to
be claimed for those, who have failed in their duties; while the
destruction of a hundred and fifty wretches, left to the most cruel fate,
scarcely excited a murmur of disapprobation? Are we still in those times,
when men and things were sacrificed to the caprices of favour? Are the
resources and the dignities of the State, still the exclusive patrimony of
a privileged class? and are there other titles to places and honours,
besides merit and talents?

Let us venture to advance another truth, a truth useful to the Minister
himself. There exists among the officers of the Marine, an intractable
_esprit de corps_, a pretended point of honour, equally false and arrogant,
which leads them to consider as an insult to the whole navy, the discovery
of one guilty individual. This inadmissible principle, which is useful only
to insignificance, to intrigue, to people the least worthy to call on the
name of honour, has the most ruinous consequences for the State, and the
public service. By this, incapacity and baseness are always covered with a
guilty veil, which they dare to attempt to render sacred; by this, the
favours of government are bestowed at random, upon persons, who impose upon
it the strange obligation of being perpetually in the dark respecting them.
Under the protection of this obligation of officious silence, hitherto
seconded by the slavery of the press, men without talents survive every