es as he rose up lean and gaunt by my side.

"I'm here to-day to speak to the men who work in stokeholes naked," he
said. "I'm here to talk of the lives you lead--the lives that millions
before you have led--for a few brief years--and then they have died. For
lives in stokeholes are not long. And before I begin I propose that we
stand for a moment with uncovered heads." He looked out over the
multitude as though seeing far beyond them, and his voice was as harsh
as the look in his eyes. "As a tribute to all the dead stokers," he
said.

And in a breathless silence the multitude did what he had asked. Joe
broke this silence sharply.

"Now for life and the living," he said. "Why was it that those men all
died? What has the change from sails to steam done to the lives of the
men at sea?

"The old sailor at least had air to breathe. But what you breathe is red
hot gas--I know because I've been there. There is a gong upon the wall,
and when it clangs you heave in coal, and if when it clangs faster you
don't keep quite up to its pace, a white light flashes out of the wall,
and that light is the Chief Engineer's way of saying, 'God damn you,
keep up those fires down there! Time is money! Who are you?'

"The old-time sailor lived on deck. He had the winds, the sun and the
stars. But you live down between steel walls--with only the glare of
electric lights in which you sleep and eat and sweat. You work at all
kinds of irregular hours, for you there is no day or night. You don't
know whether the millionaire and his last and loveliest wife are
drinking champagne before going to bed, in their cabin de luxe above
you, or taking their coffee the next day at noon. You don't know about
anything way up there--unless you go up as I've seen you do, half out of
your senses from the heat, and make a sudden jump for the rail. The cry
is heard--'Man overboard!'--then shrieks and a chorus of 'Oh-my-God's!'
And then somebody says, 'It's only a stoker.'"

He stopped short, and at the sudden roar of the crowd I saw him frown
and quiver. He drew a deep, slow breath and went on:

"They threw off all the good in the ship with sails--but they carefully
kept all that was bad. The old mutiny laws--they kept all that.
Undermanning of crews--they kept all that. The waterfront sharks--they
kept all that. But there was one thing they couldn't keep--the old
sailor's habit of standing all this! He had run away to sea as a boy,
he'd been kicked all his