a docker. He
was gaily dressed in a neat blue suit with a bright red tie:

"Fellow workers--I am Italian man! You call me Guinney, Dago, Wop--you
call another man Coon, Nigger--you call another man a Sheeny! Stop
calling names--call men fellow workers! We are on strike--let us not
fight each other--let us have peace--let us have a good time! I know a
man who has a big boat--and he say now we can have it for nothing--to
take our wives and children and make excursions every day. On the boat
we will have a good time. I am a musician--I play the violin on a boat
till I strike--so now I will get you the music. And we shall run that
boat ourselves! We have our own dockers to start it from dock--we have
our own stokers, our own engineers--we have our own pilots--we have all!
And it will be easy to steer that boat--for we have made the harbor
empty--we shall have the whole place to ourselves! Some day maybe soon
we have all the boats in the world for ourselves--and we shall be free!
All battle boats we shall sink in the sea--we stop all wars! So now we
begin--we stop all our fighting--we take out this boat--all our
comrades on board! No coons, no niggers, no sheenies, no wops! Fellow
workers--I tell you the name of our boat! _The Internationale!_"

The little man's speech was greeted with a sudden roar of applause. For
the crowd had seen at once this danger of race hatred and was eager to
put it down. _The Internationale_ made her first trip on the following
day, and after that her daily cruise became the gala event of the
strike. Both decks of the clumsy craft were packed with strikers, their
wives and their children, and all up and down the harbor she went. The
little Italian and his friends had had printed a red pamphlet,
"Revolutionary Songs of the Sea," the solos of which he sang on the boat
while the rest came in on the chorus. A new kind of a "chanty man" was
he, voicing the wrongs and the fierce revolt and the surging hopes and
longings of all the toilers on the sea--while this ship that was run by
the workers themselves plowed over a strange new harbor. I watched it
one day from the end of a pier. It approached with a swelling volume of
song. It drew so near I could see the flushed faces of those who were
singing, some with their eyes on their leader's face, others singing out
over the water as though they were spreading far and wide the exultant
prophecy of that song. It passed, the singing died away--and still I sat