ing, drunkenness,
or any other scandalous conduct."

Again let me ask you, officers of the Navy, whether many of you have
not repeatedly, and in more than one particular, violated this law? And
here, again, as a certain illustration, I must once more cite Captain
Claret as an offender, especially in the matter of profane swearing. I
must also cite four of the lieutenants, some eight of the midshipmen,
and nearly all the seamen.

Additional Articles might be quoted that are habitually violated by the
officers, while nearly all those _exclusively_ referring to the sailors
are unscrupulously enforced. Yet those Articles, by which the sailor is
scourged at the gangway, are not one whit more laws than those _other_
Articles, binding upon the officers, that have become obsolete from
immemorial disuse; while still other Articles, to which the sailors
alone are obnoxious, are observed or violated at the caprice of the
Captain. Now, if it be not so much the severity as the certainty of
punishment that deters from transgression, how fatal to all proper
reverence for the enactments of Congress must be this disregard of its
statutes.

Still more. This violation of the law, on the part of the officers, in
many cases involves oppression to the sailor. But throughout the whole
naval code, which so hems in the mariner by law upon law, and which
invests the Captain with so much judicial and administrative authority
over him--in most cases entirely discretionary--not one solitary clause
is to be found which in any way provides means for a seaman deeming
himself aggrieved to obtain redress. Indeed, both the written and
unwritten laws of the American Navy are as destitute of individual
guarantees to the mass of seamen as the Statute Book of the despotic
Empire of Russia.

Who put this great gulf between the American Captain and the American
sailor? Or is the Captain a creature of like passions with ourselves?
Or is he an infallible archangel, incapable of the shadow of error? Or
has a sailor no mark of humanity, no attribute of manhood, that, bound
hand and foot, he is cast into an American frigate shorn of all rights
and defences, while the notorious lawlessness of the Commander has
passed into a proverb, familiar to man-of-war's-men, _the law was not
made for the Captain!_ Indeed, he may almost be said to put off the
citizen when he touches his quarter-deck; and, almost exempt from the
law of the land himself, he comes down upon oth