Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 3.djvu/105

1805. , while they served as a protection from the piratical privateers of Spain and France. Madison, Gallatin, and the newspapers grumbled and complained; but the profits of neutrality soothed the offended merchant, and the blockade of New York was already a fixed practice. Had the British commanders been satisfied with a moderate exercise of their power, the United States would probably have allowed the habit of neutral blockade to grow into a belligerent right by prescription. Neither the mercantile class nor the government would have risked profit or popularity on such a stake; but fortunately the British officers steadily became more severe, and meanwhile in their practice of impressment roused extreme bitterness among the seafaring classes, who had nothing to gain by submission. In Basil Hall's words, the British officers took out of American vessels every seaman "whom they had reason, or supposed or said they had reason, to consider" a British subject, "or whose country they guessed from dialect or appearance." By these impressments American vessels were often left short-handed, and were sometimes cast away or foundered. In such cases the owners were greatly irritated; but commonly the exasperation was most deeply felt by the laboring class and among the families of seafaring men. The severity with which impressment was enforced in 1805 excited hatred toward England among people who had at best no reason to love her. More than twenty years afterward, when Basil Hall revisited