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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 74

Hillside, 16th Sept., 1895. James Mills, Esq

Hillside,

James Mills, Esq.

Dear Sir,—

I have to acknowledge your letter of the 12th [unclear: inst] declining to discuss or explain any of the questions referred to in [unclear: my] letter of the 22nd August, to compensate me in any degree for [unclear: the] great losses you have inflicted upon me, to submit matters not [unclear: deal] with by the Court to a friendly arbitration, or as Trustee to supply with any information.

You state that "no friendly adjustment is possible that would [unclear: be] satisfactory to you and Mr. Isaac," though all my efforts to that [unclear: end] and they have been often made, have been thwarted and frustrated [unclear: by] yourself.

Your reply is, you write, simply "an absolute denial of my statements" as "misleading and incorrect," without making the [unclear: slightes] attempt to prove their inaccuracy, and thus giving me the [unclear: opporthng] of withdrawing any that are not strictly true. Can it be that you [unclear: in] tend the latter to apply to the correctness of what I sent as [unclear: extras] from your own letters and from the Residue Accounts furnished me by yourself, or the accounts from your ledger showing the [unclear: unproduc] state in which the Trust funds were left, or as to the Accounts [unclear: of] the proceeds arising from the sales of the Harbour Steamers, or [unclear: the] extent of the profits at the time they were sold? Or as to your [unclear: refusl] to sell my Island Farm at my urgent request, and thereby losing fully £10,000, or, if in your proposal for four contributors to pay [unclear: the] page 21 Bell Award, you acted upon "the best advice obtainable," and not in direct opposition to all the legal opinions you received. Do not these—as you term them—"charges against yourself " stand or fall upon [unclear: the] accuracy of these extracts, and not in the slightest degree upon anything I may think or say about them. Pardon me if the bitterness I feel and try to suppress will find its way into and tincture my letters [unclear: to] yourself, whom I had so trusted as a true friend, but who I now [unclear: and] has deprived me of fully £25,000, and without, so far as I can discover, the slightest feeling of remorse or regret for having done so, [unclear: bor] is the feeling lessened by the conviction that the Judge, everywhere respected for his high legal attainments and refined sense of [unclear: stic,] has, apparently in ignorance of all the facts in The matters in [unclear: pute] between us, flung around you the strong sheltering arm of the [unclear: law] and condemned me and mine alone to suffer for no single act of wrong doing committed by one of us. I say, therefore, that if these [unclear: fgures] and statements are "misleading and incorrect," as you assert, [unclear: n] it rests with you, their author, to explain them and how they [unclear: e] to exist, and in some way if possible to dispel the conclusions [unclear: t] must inevitably follow.

I did not intend to write so much. My purpose in replying was ask your permission, should these letters be circulated or published any form, to attach to them your replies, if such they can be called. [unclear: The] letters I refer to are those dated 8th February, last year, and those [unclear: has] written, of the 22nd August and 4th September. Your reply to [unclear: this] request will oblige,

—Yours sincerely,

Eliza Isaac.