able to read the history of her naval
victories without a blush--without reproaching her lawgivers who
could allow them to be purchased with the blood of such men as those
who fought for us the battles of the Nile and Trafalgar. '_England
expected every man to do his duty_' on that day, but had England done
her duty to every man who was on that day to fight for her? Was not
every English gentleman of the Lords and Commons a David sending his
Uriah to battle?[27]

The intellectual stock which we require in good seamen for our navy,
and which is acquired in scenes of peril 'upon the high and giddy
mast', is as much their property as that which other men acquire in
schools and colleges; and we had no more right to seize and employ
these seamen in our battles upon the wages of common, uninstructed
labour, than we should have had to seize and employ as many
clergymen, barristers, and physicians. When I have stood on the
quarter-deck of a ship in a storm, and seen the seamen covering the
yards in taking in sail, with the thunder rolling, and the lightning
flashing fearfully around them--the sea covered with foam, and each
succeeding billow, as it rushed by, seeming ready to sweep them all
from their frail footing into the fathomless abyss below--I have
asked myself, 'Are men like these to be seized like common felons,
torn from their wives and children as soon as they reach their native
land, subject every day to the lash, and put in front of those
battles on which the wealth, the honour, and the independence of the
nation depend, merely because British legislators know that when
there, a regard for their own personal character among their
companions in danger will make them fight like Englishmen?'

This feeling of nationality which exists in the little states of
Bundelkhand, arises from the circumstance that the mass of the
landholders are of the same class as the chief Bundelas; and that the
public establishments of the state are recruited almost exclusively
from that mass. The states of Jhansi[28] and Jalaun[29] are the only
exceptions. There the rulers are Brahmans and not Rajputs, and they
recruit their public establishments from all classes and all
countries. The landed aristocracy, however, there, as elsewhere, are
Rajputs-either Pawars, Chandels, or Bundelas.

The Rajput landholders of Bundelkhand are linked to the soil in all
their grades, from the prince to the peasant, as the Highlanders of
Scotland were not lo