Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/308



“I now have the honour to assure you once more, as I did orally at our conference the day before yesterday:

“I know that in this you will trust to my loyalty.

“But I take the liberty to protest most solemnly against the slightest vestige of disapproval with regard to action,  word,  phrase, which in this matter I have done, spoken, or written.

“I have the conviction that I have done my, in intention and in manner of execution, without the slightest deviation.

“I reflected a long time before I acted—i.e.: before I, and —and if I should have erred at all in anything  I did not err from precipitateness.

“In similar circumstances I should again do and omit—though with a little less delay—entirely and literally the same.

“And even if a more exalted authority than yours disapproved anything in what I did—excepting perhaps the idiosyncrasy of my style, which is part of myself, a fault I am as little responsible for as a stammerer is for his—if it were that but this, no, this  be; yet if it were so:

“It certainly grieves me—though without astonishment—that you have a different opinion on this—and if only my person were concerned I should resign myself to what appears to me a misjudgment—but a is at stake, and I have reasons of conscience which demand that it be settled whose opinion is correct,  or.

“I cannot serve otherwise than I did at Lebak. If then the Government wishes to be served differently, then honesty compels me to beg respectfully to be relieved of my duties. Then, at thirty