d
this claim of the English, as it was practised on board their own
country's vessels! What will not men defend when blinded and excited by
faction? As this practice was to put the mariner on the defensive, and to
assume that every man was an Englishman who could not prove, out on the
ocean, a thousand miles from land perhaps, that he was an American, it
followed that English navy officers exercised a jurisdiction over
foreigners and under a foreign flag, that would not be tolerated in the
Lord High Chancellor himself, in one of the streets of London; that of
throwing the burthen of proving himself innocent, on the accused party!
There was an abundance of other principles that were just as obvious, and
just as unanswerable as this, which were violated by the daily practices
of impressment, but they all produced no effect on the members of Congress
and public writers that sustained the right of the English, who as blindly
espoused one side of the main question as their opponents espoused the
other. Men acting under the guidance of factions are not _compos mentis_.

I think I may say, without boasting unreasonably of my own good sense,
that I have kept myself altogether aloof from the vortex of parties, from
boyhood to the present hour. My father had been a federalist, but a
federalist a good deal cooled off, from having seen foreign countries, and
no attempts had ever been made to make me believe that black was white in
the interest of either faction. I knew that impressment from foreign
vessels, out of the waters of Great Britain at least, could be defended on
no other ground but that of power; and as for colonial produce, and all
the subtleties that were dependent on its transportation, I fancied that a
neutral had a perfect right to purchase of one belligerent and sell to
another, provided he found it his interest so to do, and he violated no
positive--not paper--blockade, or did not convey articles that are called
contraband of war.

With these views, then, it is not surprising that I easily came into the
pilot's opinion, and determined to give the Leander a sufficient berth, as
sailors express it.

The Leander was a fifty, on two decks, a very silly sort of a craft;
though she had manfully played her part at the Nile, and on one or two
other rather celebrated occasions, and was a good vessel of the build.
Still, I felt certain the Dawn could get away from her, under tolerably
favourable circumstances, The Leander