LIFE OF LORD REDESDALE
conduct with characteristic candour, and the following
letter, written to the Viceroy, a week after the riot, gives
'an account of his views and efforts:
"3ist July, 1803.
I return your Excellency the letter of Lord Pelham and
am extremely obliged to your Excellency for the perusal
of it. It is one of the many proofs that writing to Lord
Pelham is, as I have told Mr. Addington, writing to the
winds. I wrote a very long letter to Mr. Addington, giving
him all my view of the present state of the country, and
communicating with the utmost freedom, which I thought
necessity required, both on the state of things here and
the difficulties brought upon us by the neglect in England
of the representations made on this side of the water. I
have told him, in direct terms, that such neglect must
tend to make the Union in a degree unpopular with
thinking men; that they would reflect that, if they had
their own legislature, the act' called the habeas corpus
suspension act, and the martial law bill would have passed,
about which Ministers in England had not thought fit,
even to write, though the former had been pressed upon
them so long ago as when I was in London. ... I told
him that unless ministers would put more confidence in
the representatives of the government here and rely less
on the tattle of those with whom they might converse in
England, they would render themselves as ridiculous in
the government of this country as they ordinarily had
been in foreign politics, listening to the tattle of weak,
interested or uninformed individuals instead of attending
to their accredited ministers at foreign courts who had
greater means of information, ought to be men of superior
talents, must be supposed to have studied the subject,
made themselves acquainted with men they had to deal
with and formed a regular plan of conduct, of which
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