Now Collingood was, in reality, one of the most just, humane, and
benevolent admirals that ever hoisted a flag. For a sea-officer,
Collingwood was a man in a million. But if a man like him, swayed by
old usages, could thus violate the commonest principle of justice--
with however good motives at bottom--what must be expected from other
Captains not so eminently gifted with noble traits as Collingwood?

And if the corps of American midshipmen is mostly replenished
from the nursery, the counter, and the lap of unrestrained
indulgence at home: and if most of them at least, by their
impotency as officers, in all important functions at sea, by
their boyish and overweening conceit of their gold lace, by their
overbearing manner toward the seamen, and by their peculiar
aptitude to construe the merest trivialities of manner into set
affronts against their dignity; if by all this they sometimes
contract the ill-will of the seamen; and if, in a thousand ways,
the seamen cannot but betray it--how easy for any of these
midshipmen, who may happen to be unrestrained by moral principle,
to resort to spiteful practices in procuring vengeance upon the
offenders, in many instances to the extremity of the lash; since,
as we have seen, the tacit principle in the Navy seems to be
that, in his ordinary intercourse with the sailors, a midshipman
can do nothing obnoxious to the public censure of his superiors.

"You fellow, I'll get you _licked_ before long," is often heard
from a midshipman to a sailor who, in some way not open to the
judicial action of the Captain, has chanced to offend him.

At times you will see one of these lads, not five feet high,