Just such a feeling had the impressed seamen who fought our battles in the great struggle.  No nation has ever had a more disgraceful institution than that of the press-gang of England.  This institution, if so it can be called, must be an eternal stain upon her glory—­ posterity will never be able to read the history of her naval victories without a blush—­without reproaching her lawgivers who could allow them to be purchased with the blood of such men as those who fought for us the battles of the Nile and Trafalgar. ’England expected every man to do his duty’ on that day, but had England done her duty to every man who was on that day to fight for her?  Was not every English gentleman of the Lords and Commons a David sending his Uriah to battle?[27]

The intellectual stock which we require in good seamen for our navy, and which is acquired in scenes of peril ’upon the high and giddy mast’, is as much their property as that which other men acquire in schools and colleges; and we had no more right to seize and employ these seamen in our battles upon the wages of common, uninstructed labour, than we should have had to seize and employ as many clergymen, barristers, and physicians.  When I have stood on the quarter-deck of a ship in a storm, and seen the seamen covering the yards in taking in sail, with the thunder rolling, and the lightning flashing fearfully around them—­the sea covered with foam, and each succeeding billow, as it rushed by, seeming ready to sweep them all from their frail footing into the fathomless abyss below—­I have asked myself, ’Are men like these to be seized like common felons, torn from their wives and children as soon as they reach their native land, subject every day to the lash, and put in front of those battles on which the wealth, the honour, and the independence of the nation depend, merely because British legislators know that when there, a regard for their own personal character among their companions in danger will make them fight like Englishmen?’

This feeling of nationality which exists in the little states of Bundelkhand, arises from the circumstance that the mass of the landholders are of the same class as the chief Bundelas; and that the public establishments of the state are recruited almost exclusively from that mass.  The states of Jhansi[28] and Jalaun[29] are the only exceptions.  There the rulers are Brahmans and not Rajputs, and they recruit their public establishments from all classes and all countries.  The landed aristocracy, however, there, as elsewhere, are Rajputs-either Pawars, Chandels, or Bundelas.