and again if he smiled flogged until the blood ran for a hundred
offenses as trivial as these. His food was unspeakably bad and
often years passed before he was allowed to set foot ashore.
Decent men refused to volunteer and the ships were filled with
the human scum and refuse caught in the nets of the press-gangs
of Liverpool, London, and Bristol.

It is largely forgotten or unknown that this system of recruiting
was as intolerable in England as it was in the United States and
as fiercely resented. Oppressive and unjust, it was nevertheless
endured as the bulwark of England's defense against her foes. It
ground under its heel the very people it protected and made them
serfs in order to keep them free. No man of the common people who
lived near the coast of England was safe from the ruffianly
press-gangs nor any merchant ship that entered her ports. It was
the most cruel form of conscription ever devised. Mob violence
opposed it again and again, and British East Indiamen fought the
King's tenders sooner than be stripped of their crews and left
helpless. Feeling in America against impressment was never more
highly inflamed, even on the brink of the War of 1812, than it
had long been in England itself, although the latter country was
unable to rise and throw it off. Here are the words, not of an
angry American patriot but of a modern English historian writing
of his own nation:* "To the people the impress was an axe laid at
the foot of the tree. There was here no question, as with trade,
of the mere loss of hands who could be replaced. Attacking the
family in the person of its natural supporter and protector, the
octopus system of which the gangs were the tentacles, struck at
the very foundations of domestic life and brought to thousands of
households a poverty as bitter and a grief as poignant as death.