Sir Matthew Decker, in a passage quoted by Mr. McCulloch, says, ’The custom of impressment put a freeborn British sailor on the same footing as a Turkish slave.  The Grand Seignior cannot do a more absolute act than to order a man to be dragged away from his family, and against his will run his head against the mouth of a cannon; and if such acts should be frequent in Turkey upon any one set of useful men, would it not drive them away to other countries, and thin their numbers yearly?  And would not the remaining few double or triple their wages, which is the case with our sailors in time of war, to the great detriment of our commerce?’ The Americans wisely relinquished the barbarous and unwise practice of their parent land, and, as McCulloch observes, ’While the wages of all labourers and artisans are uniformly higher in the United States than in England, those of sailors are generally lower,’ as the natural consequence of manning their navy by means of voluntary enlistment alone.  At the close of the last war, sixteen thousand British sailors were serving on board of American ships; and the wages of our seamen rose from forty or[23] fifty to a hundred or one hundred and twenty shillings a month, as the natural consequence of our continuing to resort to impressment after the Americans had given it up.[24]

Frederick’s army consisted of about one hundred and fifty thousand men.  Fifty thousand of these were French deserters, and a considerable portion of the remaining hundred thousand were deserters from the Austrian army, in which desertion was punished in the same manner with death.  The dread of this punishment if they quitted his ranks, enabled him to keep up that state of discipline that improved so much the efficacy of his regiments, at the same time that it made every individual soldier his ‘irreconcilable enemy’.  Not relying entirely upon this dread on the part of deserters to quit his ranks under his high-pressure system of discipline, and afraid that the soldiers of his own soil might make off in spite of all their vigilance, he kept his regiments in garrison towns till called on actual service; and that they might not desert on their way from one garrison to another during relief, he never had them relieved at all.  A trooper was flogged for falling from his horse, though he had broken a limb in his fall; it was difficult, he said, to distinguish an involuntary fault from one that originated in negligence, and to prevent a man hoping that his negligence would be forgiven, all blunders were punished, from whatever cause arising.  No soldier was suffered to quit his garrison till led out to fight; and when a desertion took place, cannons were fired to announce it to the surrounding country.  Great rewards were given for apprehending, and severe punishments inflicted for harbouring, the criminal; and he was soon hunted down, and brought back.  A soldier was, therefore, always a prisoner and a slave.