e the common sailors work
from six to eight hours in the day; but they give them very good
vegetable food, and enough of it; and lodge them in airy places; and
always dispose the officers _according to their rank_; whereas the
British seem to take a delight in confounding and mixing together, the
officers with their men. As to their punishments among themselves,
they will cut off a man's head; and strangle him with a bowstring, in
a summary manner; but a Turk, or Algerine, would sicken at the sight
of a whipping in the navy; and in the _army_ of the _Christian_ king
of England. There is no nation upon this globe of earth that treats
its soldiers and sailors with that degree of barbarity common to their
camps, garrisons and men of war; for what they lack in the number of
lashes on board a ship, they make up in the severity of infliction, so
as to render the punishment nearly equal to the Russian _knout_.

If any one is curious to see British military flogging treated
scientifically, I would refer him to chapter xii, vol. 2d, of _Dr. R.
Hamilton's Duties of a Regimental Surgeon_, from page 22 to 82. The
reading of it is enough to spoil an hungry man's dinner. We there read
of the suppuration, and stench that follow after seven or eight
hundred lashes; and that some men have complained that its
offensiveness was almost equal to the whipping. We there read of the
surgeon discharging a pound and a half of matter from an abscess,
formed in consequence of a merciless punishment.--The reader may also
be entertained with the discussion, whether it is _best_ to wash the
_cats_ clear from the blood, (for the executioners lay on twenty-five
strokes, and then another twenty-five, and so on, till the nine
hundred or a thousand, ordered, are finished) or whether it is best to
let the blood dry on the knots of the whip, in order to make it _cut
the sharper_. There, too, you may learn the advantage of having the
naked wretch tied fast and firm, so that he may not wring and twist
about to avoid the torture, which, he says, if not attended to, may
destroy the sight, by the whip cutting his eyes; or his cheeks and
breasts may be cut for want of this precaution. He says, however, that
in those regiments, who punish by running the gauntlet, it is almost
impossible to prevent the man from being cut from the nape of the neck
to his hams. You will there find a description of a neat contrivance,
used at Gibraltar, which was compounded of the sto