Association was the subject of a good deal of cheap
ridicule in its early days, and caricaturists, most of them long since
forgotten, delighted in humorous illustrations of the oddities by which
social life was to be profusely diversified when science was taught at
popular meetings, and not merely men, but even women and young women,
could sit in the public hall and listen to great professors discoursing
on the construction of the earth and the laws which regulate the
movements of the heavenly bodies. The present generation has almost
completely forgotten even the fact that the British Association was
once a familiar and favorite subject for the pen and pencil of
satirists. "The schoolmaster is abroad" was an expression used by
Brougham to illustrate the educational movement which was going on in
his time, and which he did as much as any man could have done to set
and to keep in motion. King William himself, we may be sure, took only
a very moderate interest in all these goings {263} on, but, at all
events, he did not stand in the way of the general educational
movement; and indeed he gave it a kindly word of patronage and
encouragement whenever it seemed a part of his State functions to
sanction the progress of science by his royal recognition.

[Sidenote: 1831--The press-gang]

Among the many reforms accomplished in this reign of reform was that
which effected the practical abolition of the system of impressment for
the Navy, that system which had so long worked its purposes through the
action of what was familiarly known as the press-gang. The press-gang
system had been in force from very remote days indeed, for it is shown
by statute and by record to have been in operation before 1378. In
1641 the practice was declared illegal by Parliament; but Parliament
might just as well not have troubled itself upon the subject, for the
impressment of seamen went on just as if nothing had happened.
Whenever seamen were required to man the royal fleet in time of war,
the press-gang instantly came into operation. Its mode of action was
simple and straight-forward, and consisted of the forcible arrest and
complete capture of merchant seamen and fishermen, or stalwart young
men of any kind, in seaport towns, who looked as if they had seen
service on some kind of sailing craft. The ordinary practice was that
an officer and a party of seamen and marines landed from some ships of
war in the harbor, and seized and carried off