74 Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 



be afterwards written out more fully and more deliberately. At 

 the meeting in question, a rough minute was of course taken 

 down ; and it did contain the name of Captain Beaufort. That 

 minute was afterwards corrected, as I have already sufficiently ex- 

 plained in my letter to the President. The rough draft itself, be- 

 ing then of no use, was destroyed. The Paper which the Assistant 

 Secretary has in his possession, and which Mr. Babbage has mis- 

 taken for the original rough draft, is the fair copy of this cor- 

 rected minute. The whole of his reasoning built upon this erro- 

 neous supposition falls, therefore, to the ground. Had he, both 

 in this and in other instances, taken the trouble to inquire into 

 the truth of facts from the persons capable of giving him the 

 most accurate information, namely from the Secretaries them- 

 selves, he would have escaped committing this error, and been 

 spared the pain he must surely feel at having brought forwards 

 groundless accusations : nor would he have hazarded the insinua- 

 tion, that it was intended to conceal the fact of Capt. Beaufort's 

 refusal to be nominated on the Council ; than which, it is scarcely 

 necessary to say, no charge can be more void of foundation. 



" The same direct course of inquiry would also have prevented 

 the incorrect statements contained in the latter part of his reply. 

 Had it occurred to him that the persons most likely to give him ac- 

 curate information respecting the meeting of the Committee of the 

 1 lth of February were those who were present at it, he might have 

 saved himself the trouble of reiterating his imaginary charges, and 

 of accumulating hypotheses to sustain them. Instead of assuming 

 that the Council must necessarily have met, merely because it had 

 been summoned ; and that having met, it must have transacted 

 business ; and that ' the only business it transacted probably was 

 to resolve itself immediately into a Committee of Papers ;' and that 

 a minute of such transaction ought to have been made; and that, 

 consequently, the Secretary must have been guilty of negligence 

 in not entering such minute ; — he would have learned the real fact, 

 that no meeting of the Council was held at all. The President stated 

 at the time, that as there was no business to come before the Council, 

 he had given orders to summon a Committee only, and not a 

 Council; but a summons for the latter had, by accident, accom- 

 panied that for the Committee. The Council' therefore held no 

 meeting; — the mace was not placed upon the table;— there was 

 no business transacted, — no resolving of itself into a Committee, 

 — no minute to take down, — no negligence in not recording a non- 

 entity. 



" As to Mr. Babbage's question respecting the particular passage 

 in his book in which he has stigmatized the minutes as unworthy of 

 confidence, I should indeed be most happy to find that he did not 

 intend to convey the harsh censure which the tone of his criticisms 

 appears to imply. I do not however see how the concluding pa- 

 ragraph of chap. iv. sect. 3. (page 65) can bear any other inter- 

 pretation. 



Bernard Street, June 21, 1830. P. M. Roget." 



