BILLY BUDDPREFACETHE year 1797, the year of this narrative, belongs to a period which, as every thinker now feels, involved a Crisis for Christendom not exceeded in its undetermined momentousness at the time by any other era whereof there is record. The opening proposition made by the Spirit of that Age, involved rectification of the Old World's hereditary wrongs. In France,, to some extent, this was bloodily effected. But what then? Straightway the Revolution itself became a wrongdoer, one more oppressive than the kings. Under Napoleon it enthroned upstart kings, and initiated that prolonged agony of continual war whose final throe was Waterloo. During those years not the wisest could have foreseen that the outcome of all would be what to some thinkers apparently it has since turned out to be, a political advance along nearly the whole line for Europeans. Now, as elsewhere hinted, it was something caught from
the Revolutionary Spirit that at Spithead emboldened the
man-of-war's men to rise against real abuses, long-standing
ones, and afterwards at the Nore to make inordinate and ag-
gressive demands --- successful resistance to which was con-
firmed only when the ringleaders were hung for an admoni-
tory spectacle to the anchored fleet. Yet in a way analogous
to the operation of the Revolution at large-the Great
Mutiny, though -by Englishmen naturally deemed mon-
strous at the time, doubtless gave the first latent prompting
to most important reforms in the British navy.
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