Trade complained of.

Now, to attain this end, so desirable if Trade were to be placated, it
was necessary to define with precision either whom the gang might
take, or whom it might not take; and here Admiralty, though
notoriously a body without a brain, achieved a stroke of genius, for
it brought down both birds with a single stone. Postulating first of
all the old _lex sine lege_ fiction that every native-born Briton
and every British male subject born abroad was legally pressable, it
laid it down as a logical sequence that no man, whatever his vocation
or station in life, was lawfully exempt; that exemption was in
consequence an official indulgence and not a right; and that apart
from such indulgence every man, unless idiotic, blind, lame, maimed or
otherwise physically unfit, was not only liable to be pressed, but
could be legally pressed for the king's service at sea. [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 7. 300--Law Officers' Opinions, 1778-83, No.
26; and _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581--Admiral Berkeley, 14 Feb.
1805, well express the official view.] Having thus cleared the ground
root and branch, Admiralty magnanimously proceeded to frame a category
of persons whom, as an act of grace and a concession to Trade, it was
willing to protect from assault and capture by its emissary the
press-gang.

These exemptions from the wholesale incidence of the impress were not
granted all at once. Embodied from time to time in Acts of Parliament
and so-called acts of official grace--slowly and painfully wrung from
a reluctant Admiralty by the persistent demands and ever-growing power
of Trade--they spread themselves over the entire century of struggle
for the mastery of the sea, from which they were a reaction, and,
touching the lives of the common people in a hundred and one intimate