turned adrift with Bligh, and who died about the year '22, a
lieutenant in the navy, in a provincial town in which the writer was
brought up. The ringleaders in the mutiny were two scoundrels, Christian
and Young, who had great influence with the crew, because they were
genteelly connected. Bligh, after leaving the _Bounty_, had considerable
difficulty in managing the men who had shared his fate, because they
considered themselves 'as good men as he,' notwithstanding that to his
conduct and seamanship they had alone to look, under heaven, for
salvation from the ghastly perils that surrounded them. Bligh himself,
in his journal, alludes to this feeling. Once, when he and his
companions landed on a desert island, one of them said, with a mutinous
look, that he considered himself 'as good a man as he'; Bligh, seizing a
cutlass, called upon him to take another and defend himself, whereupon
the man said that Bligh was going to kill him, and made all manner of
concessions. Now, why did this fellow consider himself as good a man as
Bligh? Was he as good a seaman? No, nor a tenth part as good. As brave
a man? No, nor a tenth part as brave; and of these facts he was
perfectly well aware, but bravery and seamanship stood for nothing with
him, as they still stand with thousands of his class. Bligh was not
genteel by birth or money, therefore Bligh was no better than himself.
Had Bligh, before he sailed, got a twenty thousand pound prize in the
lottery, he would have experienced no insolence from this fellow, for
there would have been no mutiny in the _Bounty_. 'He is our betters,'
the crew would have said, 'and it is our duty to obey him.'

The wonderful power of gentility in England is exemplified in nothing
more than in what it is producing amongst Jews, gypsies, and Quakers. It
is breaking up their venerable communities. All the better, someone will
say. Alas! alas! It is making the wealthy Jews forsake the synagogue
for the opera-house, or the gentility chapel, in which a disciple of Mr.
Platitude, in a white surplice, preaches a sermon at noon-day from a
desk, on each side of which is a flaming taper. It is making them
abandon their ancient literature, their 'Mischna,' their 'Gemara,' their
'Zohar,' for gentility novels, 'The Young Duke,' the most unexceptionably
genteel book ever written, being the principal favourite. It makes the
young Jew ashamed of the young Jewess; it makes her ashamed of the young
Jew.