The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore | Page 7

similar, though less exalted ground. Of
these the most eminent was that "great oracle of law," Lord Mansfield.
"The power of pressing," he contends, "is founded upon immemorial
usage allowed for ages. If not, it can have no ground to stand upon. The
practice is deduced from that trite maxim of the Constitutional Law of
England, that private mischief had better be submitted to than that
public detriment should ensue."
The sea-lawyer had yet to be heard. With him "private mischief"
counted for much, the usage of past ages for very little. He lived and
suffered in the present. Of common law he knew nothing, but he
possessed a fine appreciation of common justice, and this forced from
him an indictment of the system that held him in thrall as scathing in its
truth, its simplicity and its logic as it is spontaneous and untutored in its
diction.
"You confidently tell us," said he, dipping his pen in the gall of
bitterness, "that our King is a father to us and our officers friends. They
are so, we must confess, in some respects, for Indeed they use us like
Children in Whiping us into Obedience. As for English Tars to be the
Legitimate Sons of Liberty, it is an Old Cry which we have
Experienced and Knows it to be False. God knows, the Constitution is
admirable well Callculated for the Safety and Happiness of His
Majesty's Subjects who live by Employments on Shore; but alass, we
are not Considered as Subjects of the same Sovereign, unless it be to
Drag us by Force from our Families to Fight the Battles of a Country
which Refuses us Protection." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1.
5125--Petitions of the Seamen of the Fleet, 1797.]
Such, in rough outline, was the Impress System of the eighteenth
century. In its inception, its development, and more especially in its
extraordinary culmination, it perhaps constitutes the greatest anomaly,
as it undoubtedly constitutes the grossest imposition, any free people
ever submitted to. Although unlawful in the sense of having no
foundation in law, and oppressive and unjust in that it yearly enslaved,

under the most noxious conditions, thousands against their will, it was
nevertheless for more than a hundred years tolerated and fostered as the
readiest, speediest and most effective means humanly devisable for the
manning of a fleet whose toll upon a free people, in the same period of
time, swelled to more than thrice its original bulk. Standing as a
bulwark against aggression and conquest, it ground under its heel the
very people it protected, and made them slaves in order to keep them
free. Masquerading as a protector, it dragged the wage-earner from his
home and cast his starving family upon the doubtful mercies of the
parish. And as if this were not enough, whilst justifying its existence on
the score of public benefit it played havoc with the fisheries, clipped
the wings of the merchant service, and sucked the life-blood out of
trade.
It was on the rising tide of such egregious contradictions as these that
the press-gang came in; for the press-gang was at once the embodiment
and the active exponent of all that was anomalous or bad in the Impress
System.

CHAPTER II.
WHY THE GANG WAS NECESSARY.

The root of the necessity that seized the British sailor and made of him
what he in time became, the most abject creature and the most efficient
fighting unit the world has ever produced, lay in the fact that he was
island-born.
In that island a great and vigorous people had sprung into being--a
people great in their ambitions, commerce and dominion; vigorous in
holding what they had won against the assaults, meditated or actual, of
those who envied their greatness and coveted their possessions. Of this
island people, as of their world-wide interests, the "chiefest defence"
was a "good fleet at sea." [Footnote: This famous phrase is used,
perhaps for the first time, by Josiah Burchett, sometime Secretary to the
Admiralty, in his Observations on the Navy, 1700.]
The Peace of Utrecht, marking though it did the close of the protracted

war of the Spanish Succession, brought to the Island Kingdom not
peace, but a sword; for although its Navy was now as unrivalled as its
commerce and empire, the supreme struggle for existence, under the
guise of the mastery of the sea, was only just begun. Decade after
decade, as that struggle waxed and waned but went remorselessly on,
the Navy grew in ships, the ships in tonnage and weight of metal, and
with their growth the demand for men, imperative as the very existence
of the nation, mounted ever higher and higher. In 1756 fifty thousand
sufficed for the nation's needs. By 1780 the number had reached
ninety-two thousand; and with 1802