, for this time, overlook your offence." This story is related by
the editor of the Admiral's "Correspondence," to show the Admiral's
kindheartedness.

Now Collingood was, in reality, one of the most just, humane, and
benevolent admirals that ever hoisted a flag. For a sea-officer,
Collingwood was a man in a million. But if a man like him, swayed by
old usages, could thus violate the commonest principle of justice--with
however good motives at bottom--what must be expected from other
Captains not so eminently gifted with noble traits as Collingwood?

And if the corps of American midshipmen is mostly replenished from the
nursery, the counter, and the lap of unrestrained indulgence at home:
and if most of them at least, by their impotency as officers, in all
important functions at sea, by their boyish and overweening conceit of
their gold lace, by their overbearing manner toward the seamen, and by
their peculiar aptitude to construe the merest trivialities of manner
into set affronts against their dignity; if by all this they sometimes
contract the ill-will of the seamen; and if, in a thousand ways, the
seamen cannot but betray it--how easy for any of these midshipmen, who
may happen to be unrestrained by moral principle, to resort to spiteful
practices in procuring vengeance upon the offenders, in many instances
to the extremity of the lash; since, as we have seen, the tacit
principle in the Navy seems to be that, in his ordinary intercourse
with the sailors, a midshipman can do nothing obnoxious to the public
censure of his superiors.

"You fellow, I'll get you _licked_ before long," is often heard from a
midshipman to a sailor who, in some way not open to the judicial action
of the Captain, has chanced to offend him.

At times you will see one of these lads, not five feet high, gazing up
with inflamed eye at some venerable six-footer of a forecastle man,
cursing and insulting him by every epithet deemed most scandalous and
unendurable among men. Yet that man's indignant tongue is
treble-knotted by the law, that suspends death itself over his head
should his passion discharge the slightest blow at the boy-worm that
spits at his feet.

But since what human nature is, and what it must for ever continue to
be, is well enough understood for most practical purposes, it needs no
special example to prove that, where the merest boys, indiscriminately
snatched from the human family, are given such authority over mature
men