eign of Charles the Second,
under the title of "_An act for establishing Articles and Orders for
the regulating and better Government of his Majesty's Navies,
Ships-of-War, and Forces by Sea_." This act was repealed, and, so far
as concerned the officers, a modification of it substituted, in the
twenty-second year of the reign of George the Second, shortly after the
Peace of Aix la Chapelle, just one century ago. This last act, it is
believed, comprises, in substance, the Articles of War at this day in
force in the British Navy. It is not a little curious, nor without
meaning, that neither of these acts explicitly empowers an officer to
inflict the lash. It would almost seem as if, in this case, the British
lawgivers were willing to leave such a stigma out of an organic
statute, and bestow the power of the lash in some less solemn, and
perhaps less public manner. Indeed, the only broad enactments directly
sanctioning naval scourging at sea are to be found in the United States
Statute Book and in the "Sea Laws" of the absolute monarch, Louis le
Grand, of France.[4.1]

Taking for their basis the above-mentioned British Naval Code, and
ingrafting upon it the positive scourging laws, which Britain was loth
to recognise as organic statutes, our American lawgivers, in the year
1800, framed the Articles of War now governing the American Navy. They
may be found in the second volume of the "United States Statutes at
Large," under chapter xxxiii.--"An act for the _better_ government of
the Navy of the United States."

[4.1] For reference to the latter (L'Ord. de la Marine), _vide_
Curtis's "Treatise on the Rights and Duties of Merchant-Seamen,
according to the General Maritime Law," Part ii., c. i.

----

Nor is it a dumb thing that the men who, in democratic Cromwell's time,
first proved to the nations the toughness of the British oak and the
hardihood of the British sailor--that in Cromwell's time, whose fleets
struck terror into the cruisers of France, Spain, Portugal, and
Holland, and the corsairs of Algiers and the Levant; in Cromwell's
time, when Robert Blake swept the Narrow Seas of all the keels of a
Dutch Admiral who insultingly carried a broom at his fore-mast; it is
not a dumb thing that, at a period deemed so glorious to the British
Navy, these Articles of War were unknown.

Nevertheless, it is granted that some laws or other must have governed
Blake's sailors at that period; but they must have been far less s