imputed to me. Feeling as I did, that certain of his regimental transactions with his Pay Serjeant were extremely incorrect, and having received representations upon that subject from Captain Dale himself, which were totally at variance with what I ascertained to be the fact, I certainly did think it right, as far as possible to avoid the intercourse of an officer whose conduct appeared to me so reprehensible; still there was nothing of personal pique, and I trust it will be obvious to the court, that so far from having imagined and created a delinquency for the sake of venting a private displeasure, I should never have conceived any private displeasure at all, but in consequence of this very delinquency; so that in truth the matters before you are not the effect of my estrangement from this gentleman, but the cause of that estrangement. If I had been disposed to distress Captain Dale, I might have profited by a long absence of the Colonel and Lieutenant Colonel, during which I had the command of the regiment, to incommode and thwart him in various instances; but I never did avail myself of my opportunities to his disadvantage, and I trust I am incapable of so ungenerous an inclination. The present court martial has been granted, not by my solicitation, but at his own express demand, for though I avow myself to have declared a conviction that I can substantiate these charges, yet at the time when I made such a declaration, I by no means foresaw, that I should be directed to carry the assertion actually into effect; and even now I should have been most happy to withdraw the prosecution, as my Colonel has requested, but that after so much had passed, it became impossible to take such a course, consistently with my own character and honor. I should not have sought the painful task of exposing unpleasant truths, but being once engaged, I will not shun it.

Though the four offences which have just been specified to you are each individually distinct from one another, yet it cannot have escaped your observation that they are all very nearly related, in their date, in their circumstances, and in their injurious consequences to the service in general; I believe the most clear and consistent mode of proceeding will be to state very shortly before the witnesses are called, the principal facts to which their examinations will be directed; in order that this honorable court may at once perceive to what specific matter each particular question may point.

The narrative relating to the first charge is briefly this:

In May, 1809, a party of the Northumberland regiment were sent into the North to recruit under the command of four officers, Captain Dale, Captain Davison, Lieutenant Morrison and Lieu.. tenant Nicholson;-on the 17th June, they assembled at Newcastle and beat up for recruits.-Captain Davison remained but a short time, and was then relieved by Captain Thain. The senior of all these officers was Captain Dale, who of course was intrust

ed with the payment and regulation of the whole party. By instructions, dated the 12th of June, 1809, transmitted from the war-office, for the use of all officers in the command of recruiting parties; and by other instructions, dated the 24th day of June, and transmitted in like manner, a marching allowance of nine-pence for each mile is assigned to every officer, on proceeding to and returning from the recruiting station. The distance from Ipswich to that part of Northumberland, whither Captain Dale's party were dispatched, appears to be 341 miles, and the four officers of course were entitled to receive £51 3s. for their marching allowances.

On the 7th July, Captain Dale, well aware of this right, drew a bill at three days sight on Messrs Greenwood and Cox, the agents of the regiment, for the sum of £51 3s. which he stated to be for their marching allowances; and, on the same day, at Mr Elder's, a banker's agent, in Alnwick, he obtained cash for that hill, as indeed appears to have been his custom with all such drafts. Repeated applications for the payment of this sum were made to him from the officers, both by word and by letter, but Captain Dale, sometimes by returning evasive answers, and sometimes by returning no answers at all, did actually contrive to retain a great part of the allowance in his own hands for no less a time than from the 7th of July, to the beginning of October, and the remainder, from the middle of August, to the same period. It can hardly be necessary to remind the court, that an officer must almost always sustain great inconvenience from waiting three or four months for the payments that may be due to him, and how particularly embarrassing the delay must have been upon that occasion, will be manifest from the urgent and repeated solicitations which these officers so unsuccessfully made to Captain Dale; and yet, distressing as such a postponement might be, there is no doubt but these gentlemen would willingly have endeavoured to make arrangements for Captain Dale's accommodation, if he had candidly told them that he was embarrassed, by a temporary pressure, and had fairly requested them to wait for their allowances; but the fact is, that he never gave them an opportunity of applying in any other quarter for the sums they immediately wanted, so carefully did he contrive to lead them on in the hope that their allowances would be presently remitted to them; though he constantly denied that he had received the money, which in fact had been in his possession ever since the beginning of July. In a letter to Mr Morrison, dated the 25th of July, he still held out the expectation of its speedy arrival, and still promised to satisfy all their claims, as soon as he should ascertain that such claims were allowed; but, sir, you will find that he had ascertained that already-he had ascertained it in the most satisfactory of all methods, by having the money actually in his possession, and still he concealed the receipt of

that money and still, upon fictitious pretexts, he refused this act of justice to his comrades and friends.

Having thus been seduced into that injury to his officers, which forms the subject of the first charge, Captain Dale proceeded to commit the fault for which he is to be tried upon the second article of the present accusations. I mean the with-holding of the pay due to the men under Lieutenant Morrison. This event occurred at the same time with the former, during the summer of last year, while the prisoner was in command of the same recruiting party; extraordinary as such a charge may seem to this honorable court, it is nevertheless true, that Captain Dale did actually keep Lieutenant Morrison and all his party totally destitute of any supply, for no less a period than between five and six weeks. Perhaps it will be supposed that Captain Dale had not received the funds with which to discharge these payments till the period in question had elapsed; unfortunately for him it will be proved, that even from the 7th of July, to the end of September (the time when the pay was extorted from him) he had constantly a balance lying in his hands. In vain did Mr Morrison apply to Captain Dale-in vain did he speak, in vain did he write-nothing could prevail upon Captain Dale to remit the pay. Under these distressing circumstances, Mr Morrison, with a most praise-worthy and generous zeal for the service, and from a kind regard for the men under his command, advanced from his own private funds the pay of the whole party during this long interval, and by that liberality undoubtedly prevented many of those mischievous consequences which must otherwise have resulted from the misconduct of Captain Dale. Happy indeed it was for the regiment, and for the service in general, that Mr Morrison happened to possess at once the means of payment, and the disinterestedness to apply those means; for, in any other conceivable case, the situation of affairs would have been alarming in an unprecedented degree, Would those to whom the money was due have patiently submitted to the total deprivation of their little pittance? Was it possible for them?-Is it possible for any human beings to reconcile themselves to absolute penury and the total want of the common necessaries of life. I confess that I can perceive no means by which such a consequence could have been avoided, except that satisfaction of their just demands, which was not to be obtained from Captain Dale. I will not enlarge upon the effects which such an event would have occasioned in this regiment, nor upon the mischiefs which it would have bred throughout the whole army, for it is sufficiently easy to conceive, without any precise description, the dangers which an officer must produce by inspiring doubt and distrust, by destroying the reliance of the soldiers upon the honor and faith of their officers, and the government; and, consequently, by weakening those honorable impulses, which at present insure their attachment and loyalty to their country and their king.

But it is not only for discouraging the men already in the service that Captain Dale is summoned to answer before this tribunal. He has been guilty also, according to the third charge, of discouraging the enlistment of new forces, by failing to supply those bounties which constitute so material an inducement to recruits. He has been guilty, in short, of damping and disconcerting that very object for the promotion of which he was expressly deputed with his party; and here again, as in the last case, the prevention of the evil that such misconduct tends naturally to produce, is ascribable only to the zealous liberality of Mr Morrison, who rather than allow the country people to be disheartened from enlisting, and the service thus to suffer by the default of the officer directing it, again advanced from his own funds the sums that were required for the payment of the recruits. For those sums, in like manner as the former, he perpetually applied to Captain Dale, but the same unvarying ill success marked all the applications, whether made for the marching allowances of the officers, for the pay of the privates, or for the bounties of the new recruits. Captain Dale had still a balance in his hands, yet still he with-held it from his comrades; nay, in one of his letters which will presently be produced, he went even so far as to write to Mr Morrison with the utmost coolness, in the following words:-" As government does not allow me to draw money on account, I cannot have any thing in hand; I therefore purpose in future to send each party a week's pay at a time, and not allow the parties any thing in hand on account of bounties. Officers commanding parties will therefore, instead of paying the recruits their bounties, send them immediately here, when I will pay the bounties. The officers can in the mean time advance each recruit a 20s. note, to carry him to Alnwick." Now this passage is exceedingly remarkable:-In the first place it argues, that as government allowed no money to be drawn on account, Captain Dale could not have any thing in hand;-these are his own words, and all the comment I shall make upon them now, is to say that whether Captain Dale could have any thing in hand or not, in point of fact he had very large balance in hand, as will presently appear in evidence; and that government so far from not allowing him, as he says, to draw money on account, did expressly, by the letters and instructions which it furnished, allow the sum of £40 in advance to the commanding officer of each recruiting party for the bounties of his recruits, which £40 Captain Dale had drawn for and received, at the very time when he wrote this letter to Mr Morrison. Then the paragraph in question goes on to promise that thenceforward a week's pay at a time should be sent to each party, a promise the performance of which was totally neglected. Next, Captain Dale proceeds to order that the recruits shall be sent to him for payment of their bounties, in direct contravention of his instructions,

which prescribe that half the bounty shall be paid at the moment of attesting each recruit. Captain Dale, to be sure, does not leave the recruits totally without a provision, for he desires the officers to furnish each with a 20s. note; but from what source were the officers to do this? they must do it from their own private purses, there was no other source. It should seem that Captain Dale must have supposed the private purses of his officers to be quite inexhaustable, for those gentlemen were not not only to dispense with their own marching allowances; they were not only to advance the pay of their whole party for many weeks together; but they were even to provide the sums that were necessary for the march of all their new recruits. It would have been comparatively fortunate if the evils of the prisoner's system had effected only the purses of particular officers-unhappily the mischief went much farther,-it affected the reputation of the whole regiment. On the 11th of September, before a little party in my own house at Shafto, Captain Dale's default became the subject of conversation. I heard it with the more regret, because it was mentioned without secresy or reserve, in the presence not only of our own officers, but of a military man who did not belong to the Northumberland regiment; but I was still further mortified and confused when on the following Monday, I heard quite accidently, in the public street of Newcastle, a common report that the party at Hexham were kept without their pay by Captain Dale. It is natural to conclude that if the rumour twice within a week, in this casual manner, was communicated to me, to whom of course, as Major of the regiment, people in general would hardly chuse to speak on a topic so deli cate and disreputable, it must have circulated to a much more considerable degree among persons less concerned, and must materially have affected our character as a body. Indeed it was not to be supposed but that such conduct would excite considerable murmur of disapprobation, and that in a county where the connections of most of the parties interested were chiefly resident, these murmurs would be rapidly and anxiously circulated.

Captain Dale, I am aware, has more than once declared, that during the very summer of which I have been speaking, he had advanced a very large sum, amounting to nearly £200 out of his own pocket, for the benefit of the recruiting service. There certainly were a few days from the 20th June, to the 7th July, during which period the amount advanced was considerable, but I believe it will presently appear that this advance was made not from any funds of Captain Dale's, but from another source which will be hereafter explained. Whatever the source may have been, it must be observed that there was no sort of occasion for Captain Dale making any advance at all between the 20th of June, and the 7th of July, because in May, before this party set out for the North, the pay and subsistence were