Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The navy to which Blake's services were so suddenly, and, according to modern practice, so strangely transferred, was, strictly speaking, the force we know by the name to-day. It was a permanent armament kept on foot in time of peace, and governed by officials in continual employment, not like the armies of the time, a body raised for a special war, and disbanded when the fighting was over. In spite of this continuity, however, the superficial differences are so great that the navies seem separate bodies rather than the same at two stages of its development. The great change which has come over the material part divides them even less than the dissimilarity in their organisation. To-day the navy is commanded by specially educated officers, and manned by seamen who are a strictly professional body. From the Admiral of the Fleet down to the youngest boy just sent from the ' St. Vincent,' everybody has a well- defined place to fill, a rigidly fixed set of duties to perform, a career laid out for him, and a certainty that if he ' sticks to the service' the State will provide for him, not very generously perhaps, but at least surely, as long as he lives. His dress is cut and marked according to rule, and shows his exact rank. The ship he serves in must be painted in a certain way. Such and such kinds of furniture are allowed, while others are not. The naval seaman of to-day lives in a world severely regulated by law, and his course is marked out for him by a code of some magnitude. He is no mere machine, but he is a part of a great and complicated organisation. In the seventeenth century all this either did not exist or existed only in germ. There was a fixed centreof administration at Whitehall, and in the dockyards, but outside of that everything was unsettled or regulated only by...