10
Add to these considerations the way men talk, the way in which they nourish suspicion, the way in which they take dislikes. Imitate me whom you have always praised; for I rejected a province fully appointed and provided by the senate, for the purpose of discarding all other thoughts, and devoting all my efforts to extinguishing the conflagration that threatened to consume my country. There was no one except me alone, to whom, indeed, you would, in consideration of our intimacy, have been sure to communicate any thing which concerned your interests, who would believe that the province had been decreed to you against your will. I entreat you, check, as is due to your eminent wisdom, this report, and do not seem to be desirous of that which you do not in reality care about. And you should take the more care of this point, because your colleague, a most illustrious man, can not fall under the same suspicion. He knows nothing of all that is going on here; he suspects nothing; he is conducting the war; he is standing in battle array; he is fighting for his blood and for his life; he will hear of the province being decreed to him before he could imagine that there had been time for such a proceeding. I am afraid that our armies too, which have devoted themselves to the republic, not from any compulsory levy, but of their own voluntary zeal, will be checked in their ardor, if they suppose that we are thinking of any thing but instant war.
