ers with a judicial
severity unknown on the national soil. With the Articles of War in one
hand, and the cat-o'-nine-tails in the other, he stands an undignified
parody upon Mohammed enforcing Moslemism with the sword and the Koran.

The concluding sections of the Articles of War treat of the naval
courts-martial before which officers are tried for serious offences as
well as the seamen. The oath administered to members of these
courts--which sometimes sit upon matters of life and death--explicitly
enjoins that the members shall not "at any time divulge the vote or
opinion of any particular member of the court, unless required so to do
before a court of justice in due course of law."

Here, then, is a Council of Ten and a Star Chamber indeed! Remember,
also, that though the sailor is sometimes tried for his life before a
tribunal like this, in no case do his fellow-sailors, his peers, form
part of the court. Yet that a man should be tried by his peers is the
fundamental principle of all civilised jurisprudence. And not only
tried by his peers, but his peers must be unanimous to render a
verdict; whereas, in a court-martial, the concurrence of a majority of
conventional and social superiors is all that is requisite.

In the English Navy, it is said, they had a law which authorised the
sailor to appeal, if he chose, from the decision of the Captain--even
in a comparatively trivial case--to the higher tribunal of a
court-martial. It was an English seaman who related this to me. When I
said that such a law must be a fatal clog to the exercise of the penal
power in the Captain, he, in substance, told me the following story.

A top-man guilty of drunkenness being sent to the gratings, and the
scourge about to be inflicted, he turned round and demanded a
court-martial. The Captain smiled, and ordered him to be taken down and
put into the "brig," There he was kept in irons some weeks, when,
despairing of being liberated, he offered to compromise at two dozen
lashes. "Sick of your bargain, then, are you?" said the Captain. "No,
no! a court-martial you demanded, and a court-martial you shall have!"
Being at last tried before the bar of quarter-deck officers, he was
condemned to two hundred lashes. What for? for his having been drunk?
No! for his having had the insolence to appeal from an authority, in
maintaining which the men who tried and condemned him had so strong a
sympathetic interest.

Whether this story be wholly tru