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