attraction to most men from the dash and brilliancy of the
adventurous employment--it is certain that the southerners took the
oppression of press-warrants more submissively than the wild
north-eastern people. For with them the chances of profit beyond
their wages in the whaling or Greenland trade extended to the lowest
description of sailor. He might rise by daring and saving to be a
ship-owner himself. Numbers around him had done so; and this very
fact made the distinction between class and class less apparent; and
the common ventures and dangers, the universal interest felt in one
pursuit, bound the inhabitants of that line of coast together with a
strong tie, the severance of which by any violent extraneous
measure, gave rise to passionate anger and thirst for vengeance. A
Yorkshireman once said to me, 'My county folk are all alike. Their
first thought is how to resist. Why! I myself, if I hear a man say
it is a fine day, catch myself trying to find out that it is no such
thing. It is so in thought; it is so in word; it is so in deed.'

So you may imagine the press-gang had no easy time of it on the
Yorkshire coast. In other places they inspired fear, but here rage
and hatred. The Lord Mayor of York was warned on 20th January, 1777,
by an anonymous letter, that 'if those men were not sent from the
city on or before the following Tuesday, his lordship's own
dwelling, and the Mansion-house also, should be burned to the
ground.'

Perhaps something of the ill-feeling that prevailed on the subject
was owing to the fact which I have noticed in other places similarly
situated. Where the landed possessions of gentlemen of ancient
family but limited income surround a centre of any kind of
profitable trade or manufacture, there is a sort of latent ill-will