arrant, for some offence therein set down, you were indeed
to "suffer death," even then the Martial Law might hunt you straight
through the other world, and out again at its other end, following you
through all eternity, like an endless thread on the inevitable track of
its own point, passing unnumbered needles through.

CHAPTER LXXI.

THE GENEALOGY OF THE ARTICLES OF WAR.

As the Articles of War form the ark and constitution of the penal laws
of the American Navy, in all sobriety and earnestness it may be well to
glance at their origin. Whence came they? And how is it that one arm of
the national defences of a Republic comes to be ruled by a Turkish
code, whose every section almost, like each of the tubes of a revolving
pistol, fires nothing short of death into the heart of an offender? How
comes it that, by virtue of a law solemnly ratified by a Congress of
freemen, the representatives of freemen, thousands of Americans are
subjected to the most despotic usages, and, from the dockyards of a
republic, absolute monarchies are launched, with the "glorious stars
and stripes" for an ensign? By what unparalleled anomaly, by what
monstrous grafting of tyranny upon freedom did these Articles of War
ever come to be so much as heard of in the American Navy?

Whence came they? They cannot be the indigenous growth of those
political institutions, which are based upon that arch-democrat Thomas
Jefferson's Declaration of Independence? No; they are an importation
from abroad, even from Britain, whose laws we Americans hurled off as
tyrannical, and yet retained the most tyrannical of all.

But we stop not here; for these Articles of War had their congenial
origin in a period of the history of Britain when the Puritan Republic
had yielded to a monarchy restored; when a hangman Judge Jeffreys
sentenced a world's champion like Algernon Sidney to the block; when
one of a race by some deemed accursed of God--even a Stuart, was on the
throne; and a Stuart, also, was at the head of the Navy, as Lord High
Admiral. One, the son of a King beheaded for encroachments upon the
rights of his people, and the other, his own brother, afterward a king,
James II., who was hurled from the throne for his tyranny. This is the
origin of the Articles of War; and it carries with it an unmistakable
clew to their despotism.[4]

----

[FOOTNOTE-4] The first Naval Articles of War in the English language
were passed in the thirteenth year of the r