test.

Fair to look upon while still in the air, these fruits of leisured
superannuation proved deceptively unsound when plucked by the hand of
experiment. Registration, first adopted in 1696, held out undeniable
advantages to the seaman. Under its provisions he drew a yearly
allowance when not required at sea, and extra prize-money when on
active service. Yet the bait did not tempt him, and the system was
soon discarded as useless and inoperative. Bounty, defined by some
sentimentalist as a "bribe to Neptune," for a while made a stronger
appeal; but, ranging as it did from five to almost any number of
pounds under one hundred per head, it proved a bribe indeed, and by
putting an irresistible premium on desertion threatened to decimate
the very ships it was intended to man. In 1795 what was commonly known
as the Quota Scheme superseded it. This was a plan of Pitt's devising,
under which each county contributed to the fleet according to its
population, the quota varying from one thousand and eighty-one men for
Yorkshire to twenty-three for Rutland, whilst a minor Act levied
special toll on seaports, London leading the way with five thousand
seven hundred and four men. Like its predecessor Bounty, however, this
mode of recruiting drained the Navy in order to feed it. Both systems,
moreover, possessed another and more serious defect. When their
initial enthusiasm had cooled, the counties, perhaps from force of
habit as component parts of a country whose backbone was trade, bought
in the cheapest market. Hence the Quota Man, consisting as he
generally did of the offscourings of the merchant service, was seldom
or never worth the money paid for him. An old man-o'-war's-man,
picking up a miserable specimen of this class of recruit by the slack
of his ragged breeches, remarked to his grinning messmates as he
dangled the disreputable object before their eyes: "'Ere's a lubber as