Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/324

 “Your Excellency has also not been pleased to comply with my repeated subsequent requests for an audience.

“Your Excellency therefore has placed an official (these are Your Excellency’s own words!), one who for seventeen years served the State in these colonies, one who not only had done no wrong, but who had even with unprecedented self-denial aimed at doing right and was ready to stake everything for honour and duty  such an one Your Excellency has placed below criminals. For to criminals one gives at least a.

“That Your Excellency has been misled with regard to me, is a thing I can understand. But I do not understand why Your Excellency should have refused to take the opportunity of escaping from such misguidance.

“To-morrow Your Excellency departs from here, and I may not let you leave without once more having said

“The reasons on which the disapprobation expressed in Your Excellency’s Cabinet-massive of 23rd March is based are.

“This I can, and I should already have done so if Your Excellency had been pleased to grant me half an hour’s audience. If Your Excellency had been able to spare one half hour

“This has not been the case. A respectable family has thereby been reduced to poverty

“About this, however, I do not complain.

“But Your Excellency has  and it is  of which I complain.

“ cries to heaven!

“There is blood on the money saved from your Indian salary received, Excellency!