Confirmation, if confirmation is needed, can be adduced on the high authority of Mr. M. Oppenheim.  We wanted tens of thousands, and forcible impressment was giving us half-dozens, or, at the best, scores.  Even of those it provided, but a small proportion was really forced to serve.  Mr. Oppenheim tells us of an Act of Parliament (17 Charles I) legalising forcible impressment, which seems to have been passed to satisfy the sailors.  If anyone should think this absurd, he may be referred to the remarkable expression of opinion by some of the older seamen of Sunderland and Shields when the Russian war broke out in 1854.  The married sailors, they said, naturally waited for the impressment, for ’we know that has always been and always will be preceded by the proclamation of bounty.’

The most fruitful source of error as to the procedure of the press-gang has been a deficient knowledge of etymology.  The word has, properly, no relation to the use of force, and has no etymological connection with ‘press’ and its compounds, ‘compress,’ ‘depress,’ ‘express,’ ‘oppress,’ &c.  ’Prest money is so-called from the French word prest—­that is, readie money, for that it bindeth all those that have received it to be ready at all times appointed.’  Professor Laughton tells us that ’A prest or imprest was an earnest or advance paid on account.  A prest man was really a man who received the prest of 12d., as a soldier when enlisted.’  Writers, and some in an age when precision in spelling is thought important, have frequently spelled prest pressed, and imprest impressed.  The natural result has been that the thousands who had received ‘prest money’ were classed as ‘pressed’ into the service by force.

The foregoing may be summed up as follows:—­

For 170 years at least there never has been a time when the British merchant service did not contain an appreciable percentage of foreigners.

During the last three (and greatest) maritime wars in which this country has been involved only a small proportion of the immense number of men required by the navy came, or could have come, from the merchant service.

The number of men raised for the navy by forcible impressment in war time has been enormously exaggerated owing to a confusion of terms.  As a matter of fact the number so raised, for quite two centuries, was only an insignificant fraction of the whole.

V

FACTS AND FANCIES ABOUT THE PRESS-GANG[60]

[Footnote 60:  Written in 1900, (NationalReview_.)]