apparatus, Nelson could so write in 1804, and a well-informed historian* comment thus in 1882: "If it were left to the wolves to decide on their rights to the captured sheep, the latter would have much the same chance of release as vessels in the prize court of the captor."

The times of which I write were times in which there prevailed much private virtue and much honour as between man and man; public virtue hardly existed. Why should the prize - court judges be very strict or examine very minutely the evidence of the privateer purser already totting up his share of the prey, when the whole British nation, in their national capacity, were playing the part of the queen-pirate nation of the earth, veneering a lawless cupidity under a thin varnish of religion, love of country, horror of French excesses, Napoleonic despotism, etc.? Whether the privateers' seizure was lawful or unlawful, was it not a blow at foreign commerce, and a diversion of the carrying trade into English bottoms? "Yet it was for the sake of such spoliation, which England chose to regard as her maritime right and to identify with her maritime ascendancy, that under the pretext of solicitude for the liberties of Europe, she fought her long war with France, and became the enemy in turn of nearly every

* J. A. Farrer. See his Essay in Gentleman's Magazine, 1882, p. 215 and seq.

other civilised power in the world." Nelson, who knew the meaning of discipline and obedience to law and written instructions, could perceive with an eye whose keenness was sharpened by the professional jealousy of the regular navy, the wickedness of the privateering system. What he could not see was the wickedness of a system of which he was part, and which aimed at and accomplished the oppression of the nations. The assertion that free ships make free goods, that the neutral flag protects property, that the private property of the merchants of a hostile nation should not be plundered, he, in the House of Lords, with characteristic energy pronounced to be "a proposition so monstrous in itself, so contrary to the law of nations, and so injurious to the maritime interests of England, as to justify war with the advocates of such a doctrine, so long as a single man, a single shilling, or a single drop of blood remained in the country." Yet curiously enough England, exercising with undisputed despotism the right so rigorously claimed by Nelson, exercising it on all seas and all nations, like a giant of the waters trampling out of sight the merchant navies of the earth, had actually got to her "last shilling" some years since, was now living on paper money and a colossal mortgage raised upon the industry of coming generations to the end of time. Such is the law, Parliament-made law.

CHAPTER IX.

WE LOVE OUR NATIVE LAND.

THE spoliation of weak Foreign Powers and the oppression of the whole earth constitutes a pretty severe indictment against the classes who directed England's policy at the commencement of the century. Yet palliations may be offered, apologies not receivable in the higher courts where stern Nature sits dealing out righteous judgments; but here below, where man with bizarre and complex mind, as in the old amphitheatre, decides by rule of thumb what is worthy and what the reverse. The buccaneers who sallied forth from Portsmouth and the Downs to prey upon the ocean commerce of the world, did at least take their lives in their hands and drive a "dreadful trade." Many a fierce tempest, many a bloody fight it was theirs to cross ere they sailed back again into port bringing their peculiar sheaves with them, the mandrake harvest of the sea. There was labour, and suffering, and

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costly outlay, and many a skin had a hole in it ere these shifting fields could be reaped and the seapirate and his master could enjoy themselves at harvest home. Moreover, the harvest so reaped was still but a harvest, and each year gathered in with ever-renewed toil, and cost, and suffering; and each year war, or the greedy mouth of the sea, devoured the reapers, and these mari-cultural operations could only endure as the war endured. Considering all these things and all the buccaneering traditions of international ocean warfare, we will not pass a judgment of unmitigated severity. Overt and unmistakable robbery constitutes, as a rule, one of the most laborious and least lucrative professions. But what shall we say of the robbers who, acting ostensibly as the guardians of the people's interests, their rulers, and the highplaced, high-paid protectors of their lives and property, without risk, toil, or outlay worth speaking of, quietly took possession of, and converted to their own use and behoof, for ever, the commonlands of England? When the trustee appropriates the property of his cestuique trust, when the father appropriates the property of his child, we have no hesitation how to deal with him. We call him a scoundrel, and sentence him as a felon. Yet the rulers of England, who divided amongst themselves and their friends the common-lands of England, were well paid for the discharge of their duty.

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The land robbers robbed no foreigners, but their own flesh and blood. They took not one year's crop, but the crop of every year, the rent-tribute which generation after generation of toiling men in fields and towns have paid, pay, and will pay to them and their successors. They never shivered in the blast, nor paled to the stormy breath of war walking through peril to their prey. With a spurtof-ink authority to some active and experienced attorney, a few months' delay, expenditure of a few pounds, a landlord got his Enclosure Act, a thousand and a half acres of the common surface of England were shut into his domains, for ever. Merrily the work went on in these days of taxed corn and rising rents. Here, for example, is the land crop so reaped without sweat or blood in one year.

Acts of Parliament passed in the year 1801, for the appropriation by individuals of common-lands, at an average seizure of 1300 acres per Act:

1. The commons of the Parish of Hickling, in the County of Norfolk.

2. Of the Parishes of Burgh and Billockby, in the County of Norfolk.

3. Of the Fen lands within the Manors and Parishes of Lepwell and Outwell, and in the Parishes of Denver and Welney, in the Isle of Ely and Counties of Cambridge and Norfolk.

4. Fen lands and low grounds in the Manor or

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