cost a guinea a pound!" He was not far out in his estimate.

As in the case of the good old method of recruiting by beat of drum
and the lure of the king's shilling, system after system thus failed
to draw into its net, however speciously that net was spread, either
the class or the number of men whose services it was desired to
requisition. And whilst these futilities were working out their own
condemnation the stormcloud of necessity grew bigger and bigger on the
national horizon. Let trade suffer as it might, there was nothing for
it but to discard all new-fangled notions and to revert to the system
which the usage of ages had sanctioned. The return was imperative.
Failing what Junius stigmatised as the "spur of the Press," the right
men in the right numbers were not to be procured. The wisdom of the
nation was at fault. It could find no other way.

There were, moreover, other reasons why the press-gang was to the Navy
an indispensable appendage--reasons perhaps of little moment singly,
but of tremendous weight in the scale of naval necessity when lumped
together and taken in the aggregate.

Of these the most prominent was that fatal flaw in naval
administration which Nelson was in the habit of anathematising as the
"Infernal System." Due partly to lack of foresight and false economy
at Whitehall, partly to the character of the sailor himself, it
resolved itself into this, that whenever a ship was paid off and put
out of commission, all on board of her, excepting only her captain and
her lieutenants, ceased to be officially connected with the Navy. Now,
as ships were for various reasons constantly going out of commission,
and as the paying off of a first-second-or third-rate automatically
discharged from their country's employ a body of men many hundreds in