No man of the common people who lived near the coast of England was safe from the ruffianly press-gangs nor any merchant ship that entered her ports.

It was the most cruel form of conscription ever devised.

Mob violence opposed it again and again, and British East Indiamen fought the King's tenders sooner than be stripped of their crews and left helpless.

Feeling in America against impressment was never more highly inflamed, even on the brink of the War of 1812, than it had long been in England itself, although the latter country was unable to rise and throw it off.

Here are the words, not of an angry American patriot but of a modern English historian writing of his own nation: * "To the people the impress was an axe laid at the foot of the tree.