After Pitt’s return to power impressments increased until they averaged about a thousand a year. Among them were cases of intolerable outrage; but neither President, Congress, nor people, nor even the victims themselves, cared as a body to fight in defence of their rights and liberties. Where an American-born citizen had been seized who could prove his birth, Madison on receiving the documents sent them to Monroe, who transmitted them to the British Admiralty, which ordered an inquiry; and if the man had not been killed in action or died of disease and hard usage, he was likely, after a year or two of service, to obtain a release. The American-born citizen was admitted to be no subject for impressment, and the number of such persons actually taken was never so large as the number of British-born sailors who were daily impressed; but both the mercantile and the national marine of the United States were largely manned by British seamen, and could not dispense with them. According to Gallatin’s calculation,[82] American tonnage increased after 1803 at the rate of about seventy thousand tons a year; and of the four thousand two hundred men required to supply this annual increase, about two thousand five hundred were British. If the British marine lost two thousand five hundred men annually by desertion or engagement in the American service, even after recovering one thousand seamen a year by impressment, the British navy made good only a fraction of the loss. On the other hand, if the United States government went to war to protect British seamen, America would lose all her mercantile marine; and these same seamen for whom she was fighting must for the most part necessarily return to their old flag, because they would then have no other employer. The immediate result of war must strengthen the British marine by sending back to it ten thousand seamen whom America could no longer employ. Nations rarely submit to injury without a motive. If Jefferson and the Republican party, if Timothy Pickering and George Cabot, the merchants of Boston and New York, and even the seamen themselves, rejected the idea of war, it was because they found a greater interest in maintaining peace. This interest consisted, as regarded England, in the large profits realized in neutral freights. So long as the British navy protected this source of American wealth, Americans said but little about impressments; but in the summer of 1805 Pitt thought proper to obstruct this source, and suddenly the whole American seaboard, from Machias to Norfolk, burst into excitement, and demanded that the President should do something,--they knew not what, but at moments they seemed to ask for war.