their country in times of
great national peril, for the purpose of employing them ourselves;
that the first of these purposes would be effectually accomplished by
a system which should introduce and establish a clear and conclusive
distinction between the seamen of the two countries, which on all
occasions would be implicitly respected; that if they should consent
to make our commercial navy a floating asylum for all the British
seamen who, tempted by higher wages, should quit their service for
ours, the effect of such a concession upon their maritime strength, on
which Great Britain depended, not only for her prosperity but for her
safety, might be fatal; that on the most alarming emergency they might
be deprived, to an extent impossible to calculate, of their only means
of security; that our vessels might become receptacles for deserters
to any amount, and when once at sea might set at defiance the just
claims of the service to which such deserters belonged; that, even
within the United States, it could not be expected that any plan for
recovering British deserters could be efficacious; and that, moreover,
the plan we proposed was inadequate in its range and object, inasmuch
as it was merely prospective, confined wholly to deserters, and in no
respect provided for the case of the vast body of British seamen _now_
employed in our trade to every part of the world."

To these representations, which had a strong basis in fact and reason,
if once the British principle was conceded, the American negotiators
replied in detail as best they could. In such detail, the weight of
argument and of probability appears to the writer to rest with the
British case; but there is no adequate reply to the final American
assertion, which sums up the whole controversy, "that impressment upon
the high seas by those to whom that service is necessarily confided
must under any conceivable guards be frequently abused;" such abuse
being the imprisonment without trial of American citizens, as "a
pressed man," for an indefinite period. Lord Cochrane, a British naval
officer of rare distinction, stated in the House of Commons a few
years later that "the duration of the term of service in his Majesty's
Navy is absolutely without limitation."[160]

The American envoys were prevented by their instructions from
conceding this point, and from signing a treaty without some
satisfactory arrangement. Meantime, impressed by the conciliatoriness
of the Bri