By base arts and promises intended to be broken--by sending, for instance, one George Rose as a commissioner to Washington, ostensibly to adjust the whole matter amicably, but in reality to gain time, the British Prime Minister (the “impetuous Canning”) succeeded in getting the _Chesapeake_ affair “put out to nurse.” The three American seamen were “reprieved on condition of re-entering the British service; not, however, without a grave lecture from Berkeley on the enormity of their offence, and its tendency to provoke a war.” Berkeley himself was called home. The British Minister told the American Government this was done by way of reproval for Berkeley’s act in ordering the assault on the _Chesapeake_. As a matter of fact, he was at once rewarded with a more important command than that he had held--just as the commander of the _Leander_ was promoted after having shot to death the man at the tiller of an American coaster. Not only was the _Chesapeake_ affair “put out to nurse,” it was actually nursed to sleep. The people waited for the politicians to adjust it, but waited in vain, waited and watched while the brutal press-gangs continued their work. The results of these press-gang assaults upon American seamen seem--as seems the patience of the American people--almost incredible. But the figures are a matter of undisputed record. The American Minister in London, during one period of nine months, presented two hundred and seventy one petitions, begging the release of that number of American impressed seamen. The British Admiralty at one time reported 2,548 seamen in the service who had refused to do duty on the ground that they were enslaved American citizens. [Illustration: English Vessel of One Hundred Cannons] Lord Castlereagh admitted in a speech before Parliament on February 18, 1811, that “out of 145,000 seamen employed in the British service the whole number of American subjects amounts to more than 3,300.” And when the papers of the State Department at Washington were searched it was found that the friends of the enormous number of 6,257 different American citizens, impressed into the British service, had filed protests there. That more than two men would be so impressed without having a protest filed, to every one for whom such a protest was filed, is a matter of course. And what is the moderate conclusion drawn from these facts? It is that more than twenty thousand free American men were forced into the service of the British navy by the press-gangs. Their fate, save in a few cases, is unrecorded, but we know that some met the perils of the deep and were lost. Many were sent to the fever coasts of Africa and there died. Some were flogged to death at the order of officers who laughed at their tortures. And of the rest--the few--we shall read farther on. For their cries to righteous heaven for help, and the wails of mothers and wives and children left helpless by these aggressions, were to be heard at last.