HOW THE GANG WENT OUT. Not until the year 1833 did belated Nemesis overtake the press-gang. It died the unmourned victim of its own enormities, and the manner of its passing forms the by no means least interesting chapter in its extraordinary career. Summarising the causes, direct and indirect, which led to the final scrapping of an engine that had been mainly instrumental in manning the fleet for a hundred years and more, and without which, whatever its imperfections, that fleet could in all human probability never have been manned at all, we find them to be substantially these:-- _(a)_ The demoralising effects of long-continued, violent and indiscriminate pressing upon the Fleet; _(b)_ Its injurious and exasperating effects upon Trade; _(c)_ Its antagonising effect upon the Nation; and _(d)_ Its enormous cost as compared with recruiting by the good-will of the People. Frederick the Great, it is related, being in one of his grim humours after the dearly bought victory of Czaslaw, invited the neighbouring peasantry to come and share the spoil of the carcases on the field of battle. They responded in great numbers; whereupon he, surrounding them, pressed three hundred of the most promising and "cloathed them immediately from the dead." [Footnote: _State Papers Foreign, Germany,_ vol. cccxl.--Robinson to Hyndford, 31 May 1742.] In this way, Ezekiel-like, he retrieved his losses; but to the regiments so completed the addition of these resurrection recruits proved demoralising to a degree, notwithstanding the Draconic nature of the Prussian discipline. In like manner the discipline used in the British fleet, while not less drastic, failed conspicuously to counteract the dry-rot introduced and fostered by the press-gang. In its efforts to maintain the Navy, indeed, that agency came near to proving its ruin. On the most lenient survey of the recruits it furnished, it cannot be denied that they were in the aggregate a desperately poor lot, unfitted both physically and morally for the tremendous task of protecting an island people from the attacks of powerful sea-going rivals. How bad they were, the epithets spontaneously applied to them by the outraged commanders upon whom they were foisted abundantly prove. Witness the following, taken at random from naval captains' letters extending over a hundred years:-- "Blackguards." "Sorry poor creatures that don't earn half the victuals they eat." "Sad, thievish creatures." "Not a rag left but what was of such a nature as had to be destroyed." "150 on board, the greatest part of them sorry fellows." "Poor ragged souls, and very small." "Miserable poor creatures, not a seaman amongst them, and the fleet in the same condition." "Unfit for service, and a nuisance to the ship." "Never so ill-manned a ship since I have been at sea. The worst set I ever saw." "Twenty-six poor souls, but three of them seamen. Ragged and half dead."