or annul.

This view of the case is confirmed by subsequent events. Press
warrants, identical in every respect save one with the historic
warrant of 1216, continued to emanate from the Crown long after King
John had gone to his account, and, what is more to the point, to
emanate unchallenged. Stubbs himself, our greatest constitutional
authority, repeatedly admits as much. Every crisis in the destinies of
the Island Kingdom--and they were many and frequent--produced its
batch of these procuratory documents, every batch its quota of pressed
men. The inference is plain. The mariner was the bondsman of the sea,
and to him the _Nullus liber homo capiatur_ clause of the Great
Charter was never intended to apply. In his case a dead-letter from
the first, it so remained throughout the entire chapter of his
vicissitudes.

The chief point wherein the warrants of later times differed from
those of King John was this: As time went on the penalties they
imposed on those who resisted the press became less and less severe.
The death penalty fell into speedy disuse, if, indeed, it was ever
inflicted at all. Imprisonment for a term of from one to two years,
with forfeiture of goods, was held to meet all the exigencies of the
case. Gradually even this modified practice underwent amelioration,
until at length it dawned upon the official intelligence that a seaman
who was free to respond to the summons of the boatswain's whistle
constituted an infinitely more valuable physical asset than one who
cursed his king and his Maker in irons. All punishment of the condign
order, for contempt or resistance of the press, now went by the board,
and in its stead the seaman was merely admonished in paternal fashion,
as in a Proclamation of 1623, to take the king's shilling "dutifully