and their destitute wives and children calls loudly upon me to place their murder where it rightly belongs. With this view, before leaving Perote, I wrote to the American minister near Mexico to procure me a copy of your letter from Mr. Doyle, H.B.M. minister, who succeeded Mr. Packenham, which correspondence I had the honour of enclosing to your excellency yesterday.

It is not my desire to criminate your excellency with a foreknowledge of the consequences of this unfortunate letter; of your humanity I have a more exalted opinion; but when your excellency has been made the unwitting instrument of communication by which this melancholy, bloody, hellish tragedy has been perpetrated upon the best men of our country, justice, both to yourself and government, requires that the whole truth should be told, and the blame rest upon the head of him who projected it. Your excellency has been sufficiently unfortunate in being the innocent medium of this fell execution, and its cruel author, the least of all men, deserves screening at your hands by the suppression of the least portion of the truth; and I have yet to learn how such suppression can promote the ends of justice. I must be allowed the opinion, that whatever rule of diplomacy governs your official station, you have no right to hold anything as private to myself or companions which affect our lives or liberty.

"Duty to our brave and unfortunate countrymen in the dungeons of Mexico caused me to lay before the public, some months since, the correspondence between the United States and English ministers in that country, relative to the letter which General Houston had written to Mexico, denouncing the Mier prisoners as brigands, and which caused their decimation and subsequent suffering. No honest man, even of the most blinded partisans of President Houston, who read that correspondence, doubted for a moment the statement of the facts therein set forth, though President Houston and his forces in Texas had for months previous to that time denied most solemnly that he had ever written or caused to be written such a letter to Mexico. As soon as he found that I had returned from that country, armed with the proofs of his bloody murder of our countrymen, he, in his speech in the Presbyterian Church at Houston, in November, for the first time admitted the fact, and said, 'it was not, my friends, Captain Elliott's letter which produced the mischief;' but charges the murder upon General Hunt and the 'Telegraph,' for publishing a letter of the former, on the 18th of January previous.

"This subterfuge of President Houston in falsely quoting said letter, and so preposterous and unjust a supposition as that the publication of the letter of a private gentleman in a Texas newspaper could be sufficient with the Mexican government for such a shocking deed, did not satisfy the public mind. On the 12th of December, a few days thereafter, President Houston, in his annual message to Congress, changed his ground of defence, and said 'that it was a retaliation on account of those under General Somerville, who robbed Laredo;' thus charging this bloody deed to his particular friends of Washington and Montgomery counties, who returned under Colonel Bennett from that place. This last defense of the President, more frivolous than the former, shows under what awkward extremes guilt will seek shelter.

"Perhaps it would have been unnecessary for me to have said more upon this subject, so well convinced was the public mind of President Houston's criminal and malicious agency in having