up with the rights and feelings of a free man, remain unnoticed and unredressed. Such indifference to this most meritorious class of men would detract much from the sincerity of that sensibility, which was so ostentatiously manifested for the unenlightened African, unless the same persons who have distinguished themselves in redressing the wrongs of the latter, should come forward to relieve the much harsher treatment to which the British seaman has been subjected.

It has been said by you and many others in this country, that the selfish motives of the proprietors of slaves in the West Indies have drawn a film over their eyes, which prevents them from seeing the evils of slavery; allow me to ask you if nine-tenths of the people of this country are not in a similar state, as you term it, of mental and moral blindness towards British seamen, who are deprived of the benefit of the laws of the land; hunted down as wild beasts,' and treated as I was myself, that you and others may enjoy the freedom and ease you now possess? The principle is the same; but you enjoy advantages in a twofold degree over the West Indian who only has pecuniary interests; while the people in this country derive not only wealth but national consequence from the hardihood, enterprise, and activity, of men of my profession,

To do away with negro slavery, you brought forward to the public a variety of cruel circumstances selected throughout the West Indies; allow me to ask you, Sir, if an inquiry, not requiring a fiftieth part of the former labor, had been instituted to obtain information on topics of cruelty and brutal behaviour towards British seamen on the shores of the Thames, whether you would not have brought atrocities to light as revolting as those which . you say are committed on the coast of Guinea, or in the West Indies? That they should have so long escaped your notice, and that of other friends of humanity, whose feelings so powerfully revolt at the very name of oppression, exceeds I confess my powers of comprehension. It certainly requires explanation why our philanthropists can see distinctly what is passing to the south of Europe, and cannot discern what is passing in their own country. Far be from me the design of detracting from the generous efforts you have made in the favorite and almost absorbing object of your public labors; I merely wish to stimulate the same energies, and awaken similar sensibility in a cause, that appeals with still greater force to the mind of the man and the citizen. The subject I have taken up, and in aid of which I claim the support of your talents

I mean the mode of pricking for men with cutlasses in the hold of vessels, which I have heard called, as described by an officer-pinking: this I saw practised until murder had nearly taken place.

and reputation, needs no impassioned delineation-no exaggerated coloring. It only requires to be faithfully represented, and brought forward before parliament and the public by a man, whose character is free from the suspicion of factious motives, and whose parliamentary conduct is regulated by his conscience and a sense of the general good in that case I pledge myself that the evil, which is the subject of this appeal, will be soon redressed. Every motive allied with human suffering, every sentiment associated with a sense of signal services, every inducement coupled with policy; and, in a word, the preservation of our present high fame, prosperity, and rights as a nation, imperiously call for the inquiry and redress I here solicit on behalf of that much neglected and harshly treated class of men of my profession. It will no doubt hereafter exercise the ingenuity of the moralist and of the political inquirer, why the most enlightened country upon earth, famed for its laws and its respect for the rights of the meanest subject, calling at the very time upon the nations of the earth to assist it in the cause of humanity and in the extinction of slavery, should have tolerated the violence and injustice, which constitute the subject of the present letter. The solution of this problem will be more difficult hereafter, when the period that those acts of oppression were permitted, and the class of men who were the victims of it shall be considered the period the most glorious in our annals-the men the first founders and the bravest supporters of this vast and towering edifice of national glory. Yes, it was at such a period that the gallant and constitutional defenders of our national independence were exposed, without protection and without mercy, to be dragged away by fellows, (the outcasts of human nature,) from their wives, their children and friends, on board a receiving ship, and confined, under locks and bolts, as felons; excluded from intercourse with their friends, subjected against their will to the rigor of martial law, and liable to be sent to a foreign station for an undefined period. Sir, it is not my wish to raise yours or the public interest, by presenting this subject in a glaring point of view. My silence, during the continuance of hostilities with a cruel and perfidious enemy, is a pledge of the purity of my motives; and it were perhaps to be wished that you had, in the agitation of a memorable question, acted with the same degree of discretion, and with an equal degree of unwillingness to embarrass the march of the executive government.

To give you some idea of the impress, I shall mention a circumstance which occurred to myself. While walking in a street in the east end of London in the year 1808, in the month of July, about nine o'clock in the evening, with my wife holding by one of my arms, and her sister by the other, I was stopped by a man who

demanded who I was; on which I desired to be informed by what authority he dared to ask me that question. I had hardly uttered the words when I was brutally seized by him and two or three more. My wife received a violent blow on the breast, which compelled her to quit her hold; and which was, struck with such force that symptoms of a cancer appeared in a short time afterwards; those symptoms continued for several months, and only the first medical attention could have prevented the consequences that were apprehended. The ruffians struck me on the head, tore my coat from my back, and afterwards dragged me by the neck for fifty yards, until life was nearly exhausted. At this critical moment some people who had collected from curiosity, fortunately happened to recognise me, interfered, and probably by this means saved my life. The fellows who had been guilty of this daring outrage upon a British subject, ran off to save themselves from the indignation which their violence had excited in the crowd. Having been informed that they belonged to a gang on the impress service, I applied to Lieut. Crawford for their names, which he refused to comply with; and requested me to compromise the outrage of course I rejected the proposal. I next applied to the Lord Mayor, who represented my case to Lord Howick, then first lord of the Admiralty; his Lordship, after instituting an inquiry, transmitted the report he received from Capt. Richbald, with an affidavit of the gang, and the report of Lieut. C.; all of whom, according to their own testimony, were the most harmless of men. At the same time, Lord Howick represented that it was not in his power to punish the man, but that he should not be protected by government if I chose to enforce the civil law against him. A most gracious boon! Such were the feelings of sensibility expressed by Lord Howick on an injury done to a British seaman, and to the females of his family: compare them with the ostentatious sympathy he always manifested on the subject of Negro Slavery, and then inform me if he deserves that a mercantile seaman should risk his life to protect him and his family from a foreign enemy. It was the bounden duty of his Lordship to have discharged this man from the service, and to have publicly expressed the most marked disapprobation of the conduct of the officers under whom he acted, in order to offer a salutary example to others. This mau was continued in the service during the war.

On application to my solicitor I was advised, if I wished to inflict punishment on the delinquent, to sue him in the Court of King's Bench for damages (although he was not worth a shilling), in preference to an indictment, as the plea of state necessity might be set up as an excuse for his conduct, and be perhaps accepted by the magistrates.

At the expiration of four months of trouble and expense, and having no positive evidence to prove the first part of the assault, I received from the jury a verdict for fifty pounds damages. The compensation appears trivial for such an act of outrage, but it produced the effect I desired; the fellow absconded for some months, when he found means to offer me security for payment in the course of two years, by instalments, which I accepted. This sum did not pay my law expenses, not to speak of the medical and other incidental expenses, incurred by this act of violence.

But what would have been the situation of a man differently circumstanced to what I was, with regard to property, and who would not have had the means of suing for redress? He would have been dragged on board the tender, perhaps sent off to a foreign station; his wife, without money and protection, would have been left exposed to the effects of the violence she had sustained, to which she must inevitably have fallen a victim; whilst her distress and agony would be inexpressibly sharpened, from the despair of never again seeing her husband: bad she a family depending on his exertions for their subsistence, her misery would be intolerable.

Had a negro slave sustained a similar outrage, and the circumstance had come to your knowledge, would it not have awakened all your indignation, and called forth the strongest powers of your eloquence the public, inflamed by your means into a sense of the outrage, would have been unable to sleep soundly until they had brought the delinquent to a trial, as they did Governor Picton : though to the memory of that great man, whose merit was slowly recognised, the same public are now erecting a monument !

When the interests of seamen are so unaccountably overlooked, and that too by persons whose duty it is to protect them, we should modify our surprise that mercantile seamen desert their country. In April last, when the nation was again likely to be involved in war, it was found, that we had not regularly bred seamen to man our ships, had their service been required. I then wrote to Lord Melville a note, stating, that if he would allow me to wait upon his Lordship, I should present a plan for raising seamen, within a certain time, to man our navy, and for doing away with the evils of the impress service.

His Lordship was pleased to give me an audience; and desired me to commit to paper my ideas on the subject, of which I now enclose you the substance.

About a month after I had submitted my plan to his Lordship,

This was fully more than I expected; as pecuniary satisfaction was not to be obtained, neither was it my aim; unfortunately, I could not prove the person who struck my wife; this prevented me from instituting a criminal prosecution against them.

2 My letter to Lord Melville in May 1815, published in December last.

Sir W. Scott obtained leave, in the House of Commons, to bring forward a bill for the encouragement of seamen, and for the more effectually manning his Majesty's navy during the war. I expected that something agreeable to the title of the bill would have been framed. On the 15th of July the bill passed: it confined itself to a simple regulation for the distribution of prize-money. With all due respect to Sir W. Scott, and deference to his profound judgment as a lawyer, I take upon myself to say, that he misunderstood the character of our mercantile seamen, in supposing that the provisions of that bill would answer the object expressed in the title.

To accomplish the purpose specified in the title of the bill is what every man in this country wishes s; and I have no doubt but that the outlines of the plan which I submitted to Lord Melville, in May last, would, in time, produce those great and desirable results. Penetrated with this conviction, I therefore most earnestly claim your attention, and that of every person inte rested in the welfare of the country, to a bill containing the provision which I submitted to the first lord of the Admiralty, and as offering the most efficacious means of our retaining that political rank among nations, which we at present possess. In claiming your assistance, I do it under the impression that Lord Melville and the other members of the cabinet, however solicitous they may be, cannot interfere directly to promote mine, or some better plan; for such is the weight of our naval establishment in political affairs, and the reluctance to resign any portion of the influence attached to that administration, that any plan immediately emanating from them must be defective. However, should America become a naval power, some effectual scheme must be adopted, and that promptly, or we must prepare for the loss of our present maritime ascendancy, as well as of all the advantages derived from it.

To raise regularly bred seamen, and retain them voluntarily on board our ships of war, the project I have suggested must be taken up with zeal, and prosecuted with the same ardor and perseverance that were manifested in the question of the slave trade. Public opinion would be thus enlisted in its support, which would remove many impediments, to which the executive government might be otherwise exposed; whilst it should prove an effectual check to the interested opposition of naval men.

It is generally admitted that our naval system, with respect to the treatment and management of seamen, has something radically bad, arising from a variety of causes. One perhaps is, that the articles of war are not sufficiently defined, and are left too much to the will and caprice of an officer, who too often trained, from his childhood, in the most arbitrary principles, exercises a kind of