se
they were every hour liable to be seized like felons and put on board
the former. When 'England expected every man to do his duty' at
Trafalgar, had England done its duty to every man who was that day to
fight for her? Is not the intellectual stock which the sailor
acquires in scenes of peril 'upon the high and giddy mast' as much
his property as that which others acquire in scenes of peace at
schools and colleges? And have not our senators, morally and
religiously, as much right to authorize their sovereign to seize
clergymen, lawyers, and professors, for employment in his service,
upon the wages of ordinary uninstructed labour, as they have to
authorize him to seize able sailors to be so employed in her navy? A
feeling more base than that which authorized the able seaman to be
hunted down upon such conditions, torn from his wife and children,
and put like Uriah in front of those battles upon which our welfare
and honour depended, never disgraced any civilized nation with whose
history we are acquainted.[22]

Sir Matthew Decker, in a passage quoted by Mr. McCulloch, says, 'The
custom of impressment put a freeborn British sailor on the same
footing as a Turkish slave. The Grand Seignior cannot do a more
absolute act than to order a man to be dragged away from his family,
and against his will run his head against the mouth of a cannon; and
if such acts should be frequent in Turkey upon any one set of useful
men, would it not drive them away to other countries, and thin their
numbers yearly? And would not the remaining few double or triple
their wages, which is the case with our sailors in time of war, to
the great detriment of our commerce?' The Americans wisely
relinquished the barbarous and unwise practice of their parent land,
and, as McCulloch observes, 'While the wages of all labourers and
artisans are uniformly higher in the United States than in England,
those of sailors are generally lower,' as the natural consequence of
manning their navy by means of voluntary enlistment alone. At the
close of the last war, sixteen thousand British sailors were serving
on board of American ships; and the wages of our seamen rose from
forty or[23] fifty to a hundred or one hundred and twenty shillings a
month, as the natural consequence of our continuing to resort to
impressment after the Americans had given it up.[24]

Frederick's army consisted of about one hundred and fifty thousand
men. Fifty thousand of these were Fren