This is, indeed, the only tendency, whatever may have been the intention of the bill before us; for I know not whether the most refined sagacity can discover any other method of discouraging navigation than those which are drawn together in the bill before us.  We first give our constables an authority to hunt the sailors like thieves, and drive them, by incessant pursuit, out of the nation; but lest any man should by friendship, good fortune, or the power of money, find means of staying behind, we have with equal wisdom condemned him to poverty and misery; and lest the natural courage of his profession should incite him to assist his country in the war, have contrived a method of precluding him from any advantage that he might have the weakness to hope from his fortitude and diligence.  What more can be done, unless we at once prohibit to seamen the use of the common elements, or doom them to a general proscription.

It is just that advantage, sir, should be proportioned to the hazard by which it is to be obtained, and, therefore, a sailor has an honest claim to an advance of wages in time of war; it is necessary to excite expectation, and to fire ambition by the prospect of great acquisitions, and by this prospect it is that such numbers are daily allured to naval business, and that our privateers are filled with adventurers.  The large wages which war makes necessary, are more powerful incentives to those whom impatience of poverty determines to change their state of life, than the secure gains of peaceful commerce; for the danger is overlooked by a mind intent upon the profit.

War is the harvest of a sailor, in which he is to store provisions for the winter of old age, and if we blast this hope, he will inevitably sink into indolence and cowardice.

Many of the sailors are bred up to trades, or capable of any laborious employment upon land; nor is there any reason for which they expose themselves to the dangers of a seafaring life, but the hope of sudden wealth, and some lucky season in which they may improve their fortunes by a single effort.  Is it reasonable to believe that all these will not rather have recourse to their former callings, and live in security, though not in plenty, than encounter danger and poverty at once, and face an enemy without any prospect of recompense?

Let any man recollect the ideas that arose in his mind upon hearing of a bill for encouraging and increasing sailors, and examine whether he had any expectation of expedients like these.  I suppose it was never known before, that men were to be encouraged by subjecting them to peculiar penalties, or that to take away the gains of a profession, was a method of recommending it more generally to the people.