undistinguished by birth or intellect, and without the smallest pretension to military ability. Little less dangerous was the enormous encouragement given to crimping by the sudden demand from all quarters for recruits. The Navy, as has been seen, was unable to find its complement of men for the fleet, despite the fact that the Common Council of London in January 1793 had offered an additional bounty of two pounds to seamen;[199] and now there was thrown into competition with the press-gang a race of greedy, unscrupulous scoundrels, some of them holding and disgracing the King’s commission, who made profit out of every boy or man that they could lay hold of by fair means or foul. Thus the ranks were filled, as Tarleton phrased it, with infancy and dotage; recruiting became a mere matter of gambling; and the price of men rose to thirty pounds a head.[200] So large a sum set a premium on every description of rascality in the trepanning of recruits by violence or by guile; and the ordinary Englishman does not lightly bear with oppression of this kind. At length, on one day in August, an unfortunate lunatic, who had been enlisted by a sergeant and locked up in a brothel—the synonym for a recruiting-house—in London, hurled himself out of a window in the third story, into the street. Instantly a mob assembled, which delivered a succession of riotous attacks upon all houses of this description, and was only suppressed, after several days of disorder, by the calling out of the Guards and six regiments of cavalry.[201] Pitt defended the system on the ground that the Navy as well as the Army would be manned, by the turning over of soldiers to reinforce the marines; but this is only another instance of Pitt’s callous ignorance and self-deception. The truth is that while doing nothing, and probably worse than nothing, for the Navy, it destroyed the efficiency of the Army for a time, and but for the timely interposition of a capable soldier would have destroyed it permanently. Who was responsible for the introduction of the system it is not easy to say, for there were so many disgraceful circumstances attending it that the whole subject was hushed up, and is now extremely obscure; but assuredly it was not Lord Amherst, nor is it credible that it can have been any soldier. It is safe to assert that it was the work of civilians; and if we seek among the civilians at the War Office for the two men of tried conceit, unwisdom, and incapacity, we can find them at once in Sir George Yonge and Henry Dundas.[202]