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