o means confined to its
immediate subjects, or the individuals on whom it is practised. Vessels
suffer from the weakening of their crews, and voyages are often delayed,
and not unfrequently broken up, by subtraction from the number of
necessary hands by impressment. And what is of still greater and more
general moment, the fear of impressment has been found to create great
difficulty in obtaining sailors for the American merchant service in
times of European war. Seafaring men, otherwise inclined to enter into
that service, are, as experience has shown, deterred by the fear of
finding themselves erelong in compulsory military service in British
ships of war. Many instances have occurred, fully established by proof,
in which raw seamen, natives of the United States, fresh from the fields
of agriculture, entering for the first time on shipboard, have been
impressed before they made the land, placed on the decks of British
men-of-war, and compelled to serve for years before they could obtain
their release, or revisit their country and their homes. Such instances
become known, and their effect in discouraging young men from engaging
in the merchant service of their country can neither be doubted nor
wondered at. More than all, my Lord, the practice of impressment,
whenever it has existed, has produced, not conciliation and good
feeling, but resentment, exasperation, and animosity between the two
great commercial countries of the world.

In the calm and quiet which have succeeded the late war, a condition so
favorable for dispassionate consideration, England herself has evidently
seen the harshness of impressment, even when exercised on seamen in her
own merchant service, and she has adopted measures calculated, if not to
renounce the power or to abolish the practice, yet at least to supersede
its necessity by other means of manning the royal navy more compatible
with justice and the rights of individuals, and far more conformable to
the spirit and sentiments of the age.

Under these circumstances, the government of the United States has used
the occasion of your Lordship's pacific mission to review this whole
subject, and to bring it to your notice and that of your government. It
has reflected on the past, pondered the condition of the present, and
endeavored to anticipate, so far as might be in its power, the probable
future; and I am now to communicate to your Lordship the result of these
deliberations.

The American g