The forays of the press-gangs were battles in themselves, and many a man on either side was killed in these man-hunting expeditions. "Private mischief," said the Earl of Mansfield, "had better be submitted to than that public detriment and inconvenience should ensue;" but the men who fought with the press-gangs did not see matters in this light, and neither did their womenkind. The beautiful decorative drawing by Morland that forms the frontispiece to this book puts the sentiment of the time against impressment in a poetical way, but Gillray's more nervous and satirical pencil gives, in his "Liberty of the Subject," a realistic and satirical picture that shows how strenuously the press was resisted. It is a most graphic and humorous representation of a "hot press" in the streets of some seaport town, at a period immediately following upon the American War of Independence, when men were particularly scarce. A gang has seized a tailor, a poor, miserable-looking wretch with no fighting in him, almost literally as well as metaphorically the "ninth part of a man," and his captors are dragging him off, knock-kneed and incapable of resistance. But if he submits so easily, the women of the crowd have to be reckoned with, and are doing nearly all the fighting. The furious virago in the foreground is pulling at a midshipman's hair with all the strength of one hand, while with the other she is lugging his ear off, kicking him, at the same time, with her knee. A sailor in the rear, with an animated expression of countenance, has hold of her arm, and appears to be aiming a blow at her head with the butt-end of a pistol; while another woman with a heavy mop is preparing to fell him to the ground. [Illustration: THE LIBERTY OF THE SUBJECT, 1782. _By James Gillray._] One of the "hottest presses," and at the same time the most successful, ever known, was that of March 8, 1803, Portsmouth. Five hundred able seamen were obtained on that occasion by the strategy and cunning of a certain Captain Brown, who assembled a company of marines late at night with all the fuss and circumstance he could display, in order, as he gave out, to quell a mutiny at Fort Monckton. The news of this pretended mutiny spread rapidly, and great crowds came rushing down to see the affair. When they had all crossed Haslar Bridge they were cooped up like so many fowls, and that master of strategy, having posted his marines at the bridge end, seized every suitable man in the crowd.