pward of a month.

Certainly the necessities of navies warrant a code for their government
more stringent than the law that governs the land; but that code should
conform to the spirit of the political institutions of the country that
ordains it. It should not convert into slaves some of the citizens of a
nation of free-men. Such objections cannot be urged against the laws of
the Russian navy (not essentially different from our own), because the
laws of that navy, creating the absolute one-man power in the Captain,
and vesting in him the authority to scourge, conform in spirit to the
territorial laws of Russia, which is ruled by an autocrat, and whose
courts inflict the _knout_ upon the subjects of the land. But with us
it is different. Our institutions claim to be based upon broad
principles of political liberty and equality. Whereas, it would hardly
affect one iota the condition on shipboard of an American
man-of-war's-man, were he transferred to the Russian navy and made a
subject of the Czar.

As a sailor, he shares none of our civil immunities; the law of our
soil in no respect accompanies the national floating timbers grown
thereon, and to which he clings as his home. For him our Revolution was
in vain; to him our Declaration of Independence is a lie.

It is not sufficiently borne in mind, perhaps, that though the naval
code comes under the head of the martial law, yet, in time of peace,
and in the thousand questions arising between man and man on board
ship, this code, to a certain extent, may not improperly be deemed
municipal. With its crew of 800 or 1,000 men, a three-decker is a city
on the sea. But in most of these matters between man and man, the
Captain instead of being a magistrate, dispensing what the law
promulgates, is an absolute ruler, making and unmaking law as he
pleases.

It will be seen that the XXth of the Articles of War provides, that if
any person in the Navy negligently perform the duties assigned him, he
shall suffer such punishment as a court-martial shall adjudge; but if
the offender be a private (common sailor) he may, at the discretion of
the Captain, be put in irons or flogged. It is needless to say, that in
cases where an officer commits a trivial violation of this law, a
court-martial is seldom or never called to sit upon his trial; but in
the sailor's case, he is at once condemned to the lash. Thus, one set
of sea-citizens is exempted from a law that is hung in terror over
othe