So the press-gangs worked on merrily. Not only was the American walking in the street of a foreign city in immediate danger; the American ships on the high seas were stopped and stripped of their crews. The British ships even lay to off New York, Boston, and other American ports to intercept American merchantmen, from which seamen were taken until they were so short-handed that they were lost. The American seamen were left to face death by shipwreck, as they were disciplined to death on the decks of British naval warships. And because they were lithe and quick-witted--because they more readily devised means for escape from this slavery than others--they were transferred to the ships doing duty on the coasts of Africa and in the East Indies, just as American prisoners captured during the war of the Revolution were sent to and compelled to serve on those stations. As the _Edinburgh Review_ for November, 1812, admitted, “they were dispersed in the remotest quarter of the globe, and not only exposed to the perils of service, but _shut out, by their situation, from all hope of ever being reclaimed_.” They were doomed to slavery for life. How the indignation was of slow growth--so slow, indeed, that it needed the outrages of the Barbary pirates to stir it even to the feeblest blaze--has already been told in the story of the origin of the new navy. But at last a majority of two was found for a resolution of the Congress declaring that a seaside nation ought to have a navy, and so a navy was built--a navy so small in numbers as to be absolutely insignificant when compared with that whose “supremacy is in fact a part of the law of nations.” It was built of American oak, manned by American seamen, and sent afloat with the American flag flying from every mast. It did good--it did the best kind of work--but when the Barbary pirates were cowed it was reduced “to a peace footing.” There was never an effort made with it to resent the enslaving of American seamen. So the aggressions increased continually. And the politicians talked. They talked about the illegal confiscation of American ships under the decrees and orders of the French and English governments--they were more concerned about the dollars than the liberties of the people--and finally when war seemed inevitable, they seriously discussed the advisability of abandoning the seacoast to the expected invaders! The chatter about no European enemy being able to find a permanent footing on the broad American soil, where so many millions of freemen were to be ready with squirrel rifles and shotguns to repel him, was quite as common at the beginning of the nineteenth century as it is at the end of it. The word “jingo” was not in use in those days. But the men who asserted that government existed solely in order that the power of the whole people should be exerted to protect every individual in all his rights wherever in the wide world he might