Colonial Despatches

I have just seen a private letter received by one of my Under Secretaries from you this day, which you addressed to him in the impossibility of preparing an Official Despatch under the circumstances in which you wrote. You allude to the massacre of a party of road makers by the Chilicoten Indians, and describe the difficulty of capturing the Offenders or of giving some effectual discouragement to a repetition of such acts.

I have acquainted the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty with the state of affairs reported in your letter, and have requested that such measures asthey they consider expedient may be taken for affording you the support and protection you desire.

At the same time it is necessary for me, while deeply regretting the melancholy loss of life which has occurred, and the probable disastrous consequences, to draw your serious attention to the great importance of moderating by every means in your power the spirit of retaliation to which such events too naturally give rise, and of confining within the limits of justice and of sound policy, the measures of chastisement to which you may find it necessary to have recourse. Those measures must be guided solely by a sense of justice, and a desire to re-establish peace and order upon a permanent basis.

I should deprecate nothing so much as the breaking out of a War whichyou you justly say would be very costly, and which might lead to prolonged feelings of animosity between the two races, that could be productive of nothing but evil and danger.