Facing the palpable fact that British seamen were deserting just when they were most needed and were making American merchantmen and frigates their asylum, the British naval commanders, with no very nice regard for legal distinctions, extended their search for deserters to the decks of American vessels, whether in British waters or on the high seas. If in time of war, they reasoned, they could stop a neutral ship on the high seas, search her for contraband of war, and condemn ship and cargo in a prize court if carrying contraband, why might they not by the same token search a vessel for British deserters and impress them into service again? Two considerations seem to justify this reasoning: the trickiness of the smart Yankees who forged citizenship papers, and the indelible character of British allegiance. Once an Englishman always an Englishman, by Jove! Your hound of a sea-dog might try to talk through his nose like a Yankee, you know, and he might shove a dirty bit of paper at you, but he couldn't shake off his British citizenship if he wanted to! This was good English law, and if it wasn't recognized by other nations so much the worse for them. As one of these redoubtable British captains put it, years later: "'Might makes right' is the guiding, practical maxim among nations and ever will be, so long as powder and shot exist, with money to back them, and energy to wield them." Of course, there were hair-splitting fellows, plenty of them, in England and the States, who told you that it was one thing to seize a vessel carrying contraband and have her condemned by judicial process in a court of admiralty, and quite another thing to carry British subjects off the decks of a merchantman flying a neutral flag; but if you knew the blasted rascals were deserters what difference did it make? Besides, what would become of the British navy, if you listened to all the fine-spun arguments of landsmen? And if these stalwart blue-water Britishers could have read what Thomas Jefferson was writing at this very time, they would have classed him with the armchair critics who had no proper conception of a sailor's duty. "I hold the right of expatriation," wrote the President, "to be inherent in every man by the laws of nature, and incapable of being rightfully taken away from him even by the united will of every other person in the nation."