tely and reprehensibly factious. "Many
thousands of British seamen," said Governor Strong of Massachusetts,
in addressing the Legislature, May 28, 1813, "deserted that service
for a more safe and lucrative employment in ours." Had they not, "the
high price for that species of labor would soon have induced a
sufficient number of Americans to become seamen. It appears,
therefore, that British seamen have been patronized at the expense of
our own; and should Great Britain now consent to relinquish the _right
of taking her own subjects_, it would be no advantage to our native
seamen; it would only tend to reduce their wages by increasing the
numbers of that class of men."[5] Gaston further said, that North
Carolina, though not a commercial state, had many native seamen; but,
"at the moment war was declared, though inquiry was made, I could not
hear of a single native seaman detained by British impressment."

It is desirable, especially in these days, when everything is to be
arbitrated, that men should recognize both sides of this question, and
realize how impossible it was for either party to acquiesce in any
other authority than their own deciding between them. "As I never had
a doubt," said Morris, "so I thought it a duty to express my
conviction that British ministers would not, _dared not_, submit to
mediation a question of essential right."[6] "The way to peace is open
and clear," he said the following year. "Let the right of search and
impressment be acknowledged as maxims of public law."[7]

These expressions, uttered in the freedom of private correspondence,
show a profound comprehension of the constraint under which the
British Government and people both lay. It was impossible, at such a
moment of extreme national peril, to depart from political convictions
engendered by the uniform success of a policy followed consistently
for a hundred and fifty years. For Great Britain, the time had long
since passed into a dim distance, when the national appreciation of
the sea to her welfare was that of mere defence, as voiced by
Shakespeare:

England, hedged in with the main,
That water-walled bulwark, still secure
And confident from foreign purposes.[8]

This little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house
Against the envy of less happier lands.[9]

By the middle of the seventeenth centur