The power of impressing seafaring men for the naval service, by the king's commission, has been a matter of much dispute, and submitted to with great reluctance; though Sir Michael Forster strenuously contends that the practice of impressing, and granting powers to the admiralty for that purpose, is of a very ancient date, and has been uniformly continued by a regular series of precedents to the present time, from which he concludes that it is part of the common law. The difficulty arises from this, that no statute has expressly declared this power to be in the crown, though many of them