what has not been done, hits the right nail
on the head when he says, "Every one must see
that the efficiency of the navy cannot be
maintained by the frequent infliction of severe
punishments; but it does not appear to be so fully
understood that other influences must be found to
supply its place if discipline is to be maintained
without it. Suppose," he says, "the remedy
were to be tried, of endeavouring to make the
navy generally preferred as the favourite service,
and discharge from it a sufficient punishment for
most minor offences? then the peace establishment
would fulfil the two conditions of being
both highly attractive and perfectly efficient, but
not till then."

Twenty years ago, when there was an
imminent risk of conflict with France, and ships
were to be in readiness for instant service, it
was a six months' labour to man them. Since
that time, the manning of a ship for service
has always been an affair of weeks or months
in the navy; in the merchant service it is an
affair of a day. In eighteen fifty-two, the
Admiralty of the day appointed a committee of
naval officers " to investigate and consider the
subject of manning the navy in all its bearings."
They were to recommend the most efficient way
of getting men, both for the actual service and the
reserve for defence of the country, upon which
we might depend at once in case of emergency.
The committee demonstrated that the state of
things it found, was very bad, and that against
a French reserve force of forty-four thousand,
we had nothing to show but fifteen hundred
coast-guardsmen and three or four hundred
seamen riggers. When the report was
presented, there occurred a change of government,
and the recommendations, which did not at all
affect the inner-spirit of the service, were little
regarded. Then came the Russian war, when all
existing powers of raising men were exhausted
for the Baltic fleet. The senior sea lord, Sir
Maurice Berkeley, said afterwards from his
place in parliament, " We were at the end of
our tether, and if we had had a naval war he did
not know what we should have done." The
review of our fleet in eighteen fifty-six included
the last man we had in reserve, yet officers and
men, marines and boys, numbered but thirty
thousand. The show over, reckless reduction of
the force began, notwithstanding. The
indiscriminate way in which new men of such character
as could be got, had been admitted to the ten
year entries then proved a serious matter; for
the new men had to be kept, while there were
old trained sailors who had been abroad when
the new system came into force and were not
entered. And thus thousands of our best
seamen were turned adrift.

In fifty-three, a reserve force was formed by
Act of Parliament, called the Naval Coast
Volunteers. It includes now, seven thousand men,
to all of whom the country is pledged that they
shall not serve more than a hundred leagues
away from our own coast. That condition makes
them valueless in time of war.

The last effort to conquer all these difficulties
began with the Royal Commission in 'fifty-
eight, which issued its report with a thick
volume of evidence in the year following. The
advice as to the training of boys in school-ships
and so forth, upon which it laid chief stress, has
been neglected. But the lesser grievances
disclosed, which in truth are the most vital, have in
a very few instances received the wise attention
of the Admiralty. Among witnesses examined,
were some common seamen who had ventured
to send in protest and petition. They all
testified their preference for a well-disciplined
ship. Where discipline is lax, the boys run
riot and leave no peace to the men, and the
lazy hands throw double work upon the willing.
It is noticeable that one petitioner was
a boatswain, who revolted from the duty of
administering the lash, and a great case was made
against this indignity—of giving, not receiving,
the lash—which it was testified had kept many
men of the best class from accepting
boatswain's duty. Let the ship's police do it, said
the sailors.

Admirals and captains examined before the
late commission, showed how a man who had
gone for a sailor was in the first place taken on
board a dirty hulk, to stay there in confusion
and misery till his ship was fitted and the
complement of her men made up. From the hulk
he must go to and fro daily to his work, in a
boat, under all weathers, through all sorts of
seas, frequently drenching clothes that he may
have no means of changing, frequently detained
by wind and wave from his warm dinner. He
gets, they said, no pay until his ship is ready;
and whereas the soldier is clothed by the state,
the sailor upon entering has to run into debt
for the duck and cloth and thread, of which he
makes his clothes. If the new seaman be a
married man, said Sir Charles Napier, his wife
must pawn or sell her clothes in order to
subsist. The ship may be one, two, three, four,
or five months before she is ready for sea.
Before the man receives any pay, he gets into debt,
he goes to the bumboat man for his little
articles, for which he pays, I suppose, twenty-
five or fifty per cent more than the value of
them. Upon the point of starting he gets, not
the several months' pay he may have earned,
but an advance of two months on the pay that
will be earned. After that he gets no more
money until he has been about six months in
the ship, then he gets his monthly money, and
the wife has her allotment, and can get on very
well." Sir Charles Napier was wisely emphatic
in declaring his opinion that a sailor should be
paid his money weekly as he earned it. "I
know," he said, with a home stroke at the
hidden source of all the trouble of the
Admiralty, " I know it will be said that the man
will desert if he has got his clothing and is in
debt for it to the Crown. That is the objection.
The first act we do, indeed all our acts, tend to
convince the man from the very beginning that
he is suspected to be a rogue who intends to
run away with his clothes: these ideas possess
the man's mind, and we ought to do everything