Perhaps it may not be altogether fanciful to deduce that love of _fair play_, or rather of fair fighting, and that generosity to the vanquished which refuses to strike an adversary when _down_--traits which confessedly distinguish the national character of the English--to these more liberal customs which prevail in naval combat, the form in which war is so well known and honoured amongst them. Their naval victories, and the spirit in which they have been won, fill the imagination from the earliest years, and animate and regulate the combative propensities of the boy. Only strike your colours--know me for your better,--exclaims the young hero, and his adversary may quit the field uninjured--nay, shall be protected from all other assailants. Our national character, some may be disposed to suggest, has given the tone to our naval combats, and not these the temper which distinguishes our national character; seeing there is nothing peculiarly mollifying in the circumstances themselves of a sea-fight. Perhaps not; but still the customs which prevail in maritime warfare have a less capricious, and what will be thought a less noble, cause than the national character of the people who have chiefly distinguished themselves in it. We suspect they must be traced to the vulgar, but the constant motive of cupidity. In a naval combat one great object of victory is to capture the vessel itself--a prize in which all are interested. If it were not the custom to spare the vanquished crew--if, on the contrary, it were the custom to put them to death, no enemy would surrender his ship; he would rather set fire to it, or sink it, and sink with it in the waves. Were not the conquered secure of their lives on the surrender of their vessel, they would have no motive whatever for suffering it to become the rich prize of their adversary. On this account it is, and not because men are a whit more disposed to spare their enemies on sea than on land, that by general consent the battle is supposed to be at an end the moment the flag is struck. As to that “fourth case,” in which a fatal broadside sinks one of the combatants, we have no difficulty in believing that a quick revulsion of feeling may naturally take place, and that hostility may suddenly change into compassion on beholding their drowning enemy within the clutch of their great common adversary, the sea. But even this change of feeling has been facilitated by the previous habit of regarding the combat as definitively closed when a ship has been fought as long as possible.