These remarks are creditable to the good sense and humanity of McCulloch; but are too much devoted to the expediency of outrage. To speak more clearly, the discussion is conducted in too cool-blooded a style. We defy any man of ordinary sensibility to read the accounts of scenes attending many cases of impressment, without feeling the deepest pity for the enslaved seaman and his bereaved relatives and friends, and burning with indignation at the heartless tyranny displayed by the government. After a long and laborious voyage in a merchant vessel, the sun-burned seamen arrives in sight of home. His wife and children, who have long bewailed his absence and feared for his fate, stand, with joyous countenances, upon the shore, eager to embrace the returned wanderer. Perhaps a government vessel, on the search for seaman, then sends its barbarous press-gang aboard the merchantman, and forces the husband and father once more from the presence of the beloved ones. Or, he is permitted to land. He visits his home, and is just comfortably settled, resolved to pass the rest of his days with his family, when the gang tears him from their arms—and years—long, dragging years will pass away before he will be allowed to return. Then, the wife may be dead, the children at the mercy of the parish. This is English freedom! A gang of manacled negroes shocks humanity, and calls down the vengeance of heaven upon the head of the slave-driver; but a press-gang may perform its heart-rending work in perfect consistency with the free and glorious institutions of Britain.
By far the most thrilling narrative of the scenes attending impressments, with which we are acquainted, is to be found in the romance of "Katie Stewart," published in Blackwood's Magazine, without the author's name. We quote:—
"The next day was the Sabbath, and Willie Morison, with his old mother leaning on his arm, reverently deposited his silver half-crown in the plate at the door of West Anster Church, an offering of thankfulness, for the parish poor. There had been various returns during the previous week; a brig from the Levant, and another from Riga—where, with its cargo of hemp, it had been frozen in all the winter—had brought home each their proportion of welcome family fathers, and young sailor men, like Willie Morison himself, to glad the eyes of friends and kindred. One of these was the son of that venerable elder in the lateran, who rose to read the little notes which the thanksgivers had handed to him at the door; and Katie Stewart's eyes filled as the old man's slow voice, somewhat moved by reading his son's name just before, intimated to the waiting congregation before him, and to the minister in the pulpit behind, also waiting to include all these in his concluding prayer, that William Morison gave thanks for his safe return.
"And then there came friendly greetings as the congregation streamed out through the churchyard, and the soft, hopeful sunshine of spring threw down a bright flickering network of light and shade through the soft foliage on the causewayed street;—peaceful people going to secure and quiet homes—families joyfully encircling the fathers or brothers for whose return they had just rendered thanks out of full hearts, and peace upon all and over all, as broad as the skies and as calm.
"But as the stream of people pours again in the afternoon from the two neighbour churches, what is this gradual excitement which manifests itself among them? Hark! there is the boom of a gun plunging into all the echoes; and crowds of mothers and sisters cling about these young sailors, and almost struggle with them, to hurry them home. Who is that hastening to the pier, with his staff clenched in his hand, and his white 'haffit locks' streaming behind him? It is the reverend elder who to-day returned thanks for his restored son. The sight of him—the sound of that second-gun pealing from the Firth puts the climax on the excitement of the people, and now, in a continuous stream from the peaceful churchyard gates, they flow toward the pier and the sea.
"Eagerly running along by the edge of the rocks, at a pace which, on another Sabbath, she would have thought a desecration of the day, clinging to Willie Morison's arm, and with an anxious heart, feeling her presence a kind of protection to him, Katie Stewart hastens to the Billy Ness. The gray pier of Anster is lined with anxious faces, and here and there a levelled telescope under the care of some old shipmaster attracts round it a still deeper, still more eager knot of spectators. The tide is out, and venturous lads are stealing along the sharp low ranges of rock, slipping now and then with incautious steps into the little clear pools of sea-water which surround them; for their eyes are not on their own uncertain footing, but fixed, like the rest, on that visible danger up the Firth, in which all feel themselves concerned.
"Already there are spectators, and another telescope on the Billy Ness, and the whole range of 'the braes' between Anstruther and Pittenweem is dotted with anxious lookers-on; and the far away pier of Pittenweem, too, is dark with its little crowd.
"What is the cause! Not far from the shore, just where that headland, which hides you from the deep indentation of Largo Bay, juts out upon the Firth, lies a little vessel, looking like a diminutive Arabian horse, or one of the aristocratic young slight lads who are its officers, with high blood, training, and courage in every tight line of its cordage and taper stretch of its masts. Before it, arrested in its way, lies a helpless merchant brig, softly swaying on the bright mid-waters of the Firth, with the cutter's boat rapidly approaching its side.
"Another moment and it is boarded; a very short interval of silence, and again the officer—you can distinguish him with that telescope, by his cocked hat, and the flash which the scabbard of his sword throws on the water as he descends the vessel's side—has re-entered the cutter's boat. Heavily the boat moves through the water now, crowded with pressed men—poor writhing hearts, whose hopes of home-coming and peace have been blighted in a moment; captured, some of them, in sight of their homes, and under the anxious, straining eyes of wives and children, happily too far off to discern their full calamity.
"A low moan comes from the lips of that poor woman, who, wringing her hands and rocking herself to and fro, with the unconscious movement of extreme pain, looks pitifully in Willie Morison's face, as he fixes the telescope on the scene. She is reading the changes of its expression, as if her sentence was there; but he says nothing, though the very motion of his hand, as he steadies the glass, attracts, like something of occult significance, the agonized gaze which dwells upon him.