rd, he was a free man.

The English officers, too, as now, lived on terms of sympathy with their
men unknown to the Spaniards, who raised between the commander and the
commanded absurd barriers of rank and blood, which forbade to his pride
any labor but that of fighting. The English officers, on the other hand,
brought up to the same athletic sports, the same martial exercises, as
their men, were not ashamed to care for them, to win their friendship,
even on emergency to consult their judgment; and used their rank, not to
differ from their men, but to outvie them; not merely to command and be
obeyed, but, like Homer's heroes, or the old Norse Vikings, to lead and
be followed. Drake touched the true mainspring of English success when
he once (in his voyage round the world) indignantly rebuked some coxcomb
gentlemen-adventurers with--"I should like to see the gentleman that
will refuse to set his hand to a rope. I must have the gentlemen to hale
and draw with the mariners." But those were days in which her majesty's
service was as little overridden by absurd rules of seniority, as by
that etiquette which is at once the counterfeit and the ruin of true
discipline. Under Elizabeth and her ministers, a brave and a shrewd man
was certain of promotion, let his rank or his age be what they might;
the true honor of knighthood covered once and for all any lowliness of
birth; and the merchant service (in which all the best sea-captains,
even those of noble blood, were more or less engaged) was then a
nursery, not only for seamen, but for warriors, in days when Spanish
and Portuguese traders (whenever they had a chance) got rid of English
competition by salvos of cannon-shot.

Hence, as I have said, that strong fellow-feeling between officers and
men; and hence mutinies (as Sir Richard Hawkins tells us) were all but
unknown in the English ships, while in the Spanish they broke out on
every slight occasion. For the Spaniards, by some suicidal pedantry, had
allowed their navy to be crippled by the same despotism, etiquette,
and official routine, by which the whole nation was gradually frozen to
death in the course of the next century or two; forgetting that, fifty
years before, Cortez, Pizarro, and the early Conquistadores of America
had achieved their miraculous triumphs on the exactly opposite method
by that very fellow-feeling between commander and commanded by which the
English were now conquering them in their turn.

Their nav