PROPOSALS

AND

REGULATIONS

RELATIVE TO

THE ROYAL NAVY.

MADE BY THE

BOARD OF ADMIRALTY,

AND

SANCTIONED BY ORDER IN COUNCIL: Commencing the 1st Day of January, 1817.

IF the question were put to most natives of Britain, which is the first important interest of your country? after having excepted each his own, they would fix on the Navy as most accurately answering the enquiry intended. And yet, if they were examined as to their acquaintance with this leading article the majority would be found lamentably deficient. Are they familiar with its history? with its condition? with its extent? with its progress? with its divisions? with its requisites? Nothing of all this. They know, in general, what all the world knows, that it has usually proved victorious. over its enemies, and that, as the means of security from assaults of invaders, the British islands are indebted to it, beyond the ordinary expression of language.

The British Navy has gradually grown up to its present magnitude and importance: it was not originally esta

VOL. VII. No. 37. Lit. Pan. N. S. Oct. 1.

blished on system; and the regulations introduced into the management of it, from time to time, have rather been suggested to meet the pressure of the moment, and as provisions of exigency and expediency, than as the careful and well selected determinations of cool, unbiassed and leisurely judgment.

Like some of our great cities, originally a straggling collection of the huts of fishermen or labourers, forming a narrow, winding, incommodious lane; sufficient as a way of access for the inhabitants to their dwellings; but, absolutely unfit to become the great thoroughfare of a vast metropolis: absolutely unfit to be the resort of merchants, of foreigners, of vessels and their inmates from every quarter of the globe; of buyers, of sellers, from the interior; of courts of justice, and the official attendants on the police.-A city, laid out with a foresight of the necessary accommodations for these purposes, will not require that removal of projecting nuisances which deform the public ways in an ancient town; that formation of new openings, that rounding of corners, and those numerous changes in form and destination, without which a town may be indeed a maze of edifices; but, neither convenient, salubrious, nor beautiful.

In like manner, there has always been much to clear away, when improvements in our Navy have been under contemplation; what has been introduced from the best of motives, has not al

B