ready to come down from the lofty mast-head of an
eternal principle, and fight you--Commodores and Captains of the
navy--on your own quarter-deck, with your own weapons, at your own
paces.

Exempt yourselves from the lash, you take Bible oaths to it that it is
indispensable for others; you swear that, without the lash, no armed
ship can be kept in suitable discipline. Be it proved to you, officers,
and stamped upon your foreheads, that herein you are utterly wrong.

"Send them to Collingwood," said Lord Nelson, "and _he_ will bring them
to order." This was the language of that renowned Admiral, when his
officers reported to him certain seamen of the fleet as wholly
ungovernable. "Send them to Collingwood." And who was Collingwood,
that, after these navy rebels had been imprisoned and scourged without
being brought to order, Collingwood could convert them to docility?

Who Admiral Collinngwood was, as an historical hero, history herself
will tell you; nor, in whatever triumphal hall they may be hanging,
will the captured flags of Trafalgar fail to rustle at the mention of
that name. But what Collingwood was as a disciplinarian on board the
ships he commanded perhaps needs to be said. He was an officer, then,
who held in abhorrence all corporal punishment; who, though seeing more
active service than any sea-officer of his time, yet, for years
together, governed his men without inflicting the lash.

But these seaman of his must have been most exemplary saints to have
proved docile under so lenient a sway. Were they saints? Answer, ye
jails and alms-houses throughout the length and breadth of Great
Britain, which, in Collingwood's time, were swept clean of the last
lingering villain and pauper to man his majesty's fleets.

Still more, _that_ was a period when the uttermost resources of England
were taxed to the quick; when the masts of her multiplied fleets almost
transplanted her forests, all standing to the sea; when British
press-gangs not only boarded foreign ships on the high seas, and
boarded foreign pier-heads, but boarded their own merchantmen at the
mouth of the Thames, and boarded the very fire-sides along its banks;
when Englishmen were knocked down and dragged into the navy, like
cattle into the slaughter-house, with every mortal provocation to a mad
desperation against the service that thus ran their unwilling heads
into the muzzles of the enemy's cannon. _This_ was the time, and
_these_ the men that Colli