tant results. In my apprentice days there were few men in the forecastle who could read, and still fewer who could sign their own names. Among the older hands, on paying-off day, or signing-on day, the custom was for those who could not write to touch the pen and to mark a cross beside their names. Nowadays there is hardly a middle-aged sailor who has to go through this legal formality. Education taught the men the need of unity and coöperation. With steam came the unions, although like the seamen themselves they were treated as a joke in their infancy, and for some time did neither good nor harm.

The type of man now at sea is so strikingly different from that of a generation or two ago that the adventures, the reckless irresponsibility, and the callousness of the sailing-ship type are hard to understand nowadays. In my boyhood days I, like all my shipmates in the half-deck, looked upon stealing food as a righteous act. We were always hungry, since the legal starvation rations would not keep soul and body together; and as we were accomplished thieves, we stole food upon any and every occasion.

I well remember a pitch-black night off the Plate, a pampero was blowing, when one of my half-deck mates decided that we were hungry enough to tackle such luxuries as butter and marmalade. We knew where such things were stowed, and knew also that owing to the inky blackness the second mate, pacing the poop, could not see us at our act of self-preservation. We formed a chain gang between halfdeck and bridge; one of us mounted the shoulders of the tallest boy and reached up to the latticed locker where the tins were stored; he pulled out enough laths to reach the case, and passed down several tins of butter and marmalade, which we passed from boy

to boy into the half-deck. In the darkness not one of us had noticed an addition to our party. Suddenly we heard a voice that we all knew and dreaded. It was the captain, who, in his wanderings about the deck, had noticed what was going on and had fallen into line unobserved.

The 'old man' was a dear. He had often told us that we could steal as much as we liked, but heaven help us if we were found out. The stuff was taken off us and handed to the steward, who cursed us roundly; and in our watches below we found ourselves kneeling on the deck with sailors' bibles in our hands, holystones, - or perched on the main skysail yard like a family of moulting crows. That was considered lenient punishment for a commonplace occurrence of the period.

The unions have made the modern sailor a force to be reckoned with, and a force which holds the key to the transport-workers' situation and is powerful enough to upset the equilibrium of the shipping world, as well as to affect considerably those trades which depend on raw materials shipped from foreign ports. But although the present programmes of the various unions of seamen and firemen include many valuable items, many of these remain practically a dead letter and have never been made the issues of any strike. Wages, food, accommodations, and working hours are all the seaman seems to care about. Up to this time, in spite of the unions, he has left severely alone matters that are of more vital importance than animal comforts. He is thoroughly commercialized; and at present he is doing little or nothing to bring about the reforms which will insure greater respect for life and property afloat.

Now that ships have reached a tonnage and length hitherto undreamed of,

and now that they carry thousands of passengers as against hundreds in sail, it will be necessary to evolve a new type of sailor to supplant the unseamanlike hybrids who now fill the forecastles on British ships.

To the comparatively ignorant mind and low order of intelligence so prevalent in ships' forecastles, the sinking of a ship and the drowning of our sailors are acts of God.' God seems to be blamed because ships are sent to sea undermanned, overloaded, overinsured, and unseaworthy; and disasters, big and small, are looked upon as pieces of hard luck which show the risks of the calling. The truth is that bad management, bad legal supervision, bad laws, and bad shipowners must shoulder most of the blame. Unionism has taught seamen to-day how to fight for higher wages and better conditions of service afloat; but it has not taught them why so many of their number are drowned or maimed, or why so many ships happen to strand on the shoals, miles from their true course. The sailors do not realize that tonnage, class, speed, construction, capacities, and conditions have altered beyond recognition, with awful rapidity, and that the law cannot keep pace with these changing conditions. The unions have done nothing for the safety of passengers afloat because the sailors as a class are still ignorant in the extreme and steeped in the mud of feudalism and hero-worship.

So far all that I have said is meant to apply solely to the man before the mast. With the officers, the case is rather different. In spite of their higher education, their keener perceptions, and their responsibility to the traveling public, false pride bars them from doing any real active work. To unite and fight for vital interests of their own, means to them a loss of dignity incompatible with an officer's position.

Many of them understand to the letter such matters as the Titanic disaster; but so long as they can pace the bridge like peacocks or glorified hall-porters, such things can' go to pot.' I have been long enough an officer, dressed like a glorified hall-porter, to know that this is the case and that the feeble attempts at unionism have failed simply because as officers we are content to form an apathetic guild with a dignified title that awes nobody and amuses many, rather than get together and tackle questions which vitally concern the helpless traveling public. But it is not my object in this paper to discuss the officers; we shall leave them to their dreams of feudalism. They have done little for or against unionism.

IV

It is to far-away Australia that we must turn to see what unionism can do for the sailor. Here we find intelligent, educated, and self-respecting seamen, who appreciate keenly the value of practical labor politics when applied to questions of travel and trade at sea; who call for and command respect; who know what they want, and get what they want; and who understand fully the ethics and aims of unionism and the good and bad in it. Australia never possessed sailing-ship men, and the vast majority of her seamen are of the steamboat breed, but they are of a comparatively high type: the mechanical and commercial age has produced in Australia mechanical and commercial seamen who are backed up in their public endeavors to lessen the risks of the sea by a labor government quite in sympathy with labor movements, and not handicapped by party politics of the English sort. Australian seamen do not believe in 'acts of God'; they know that mismanagement accounts for an overwhelming percentage of the trage

dies of the sea; and their unions are doing something about it. Life and property in Australian ships enjoy an immunity from accident unknown in Western waters.

In order of intelligence the American sailor comes next coaster or deepwater man, native or naturalized. The American product of the age of steam is, as a rule, more intelligent and farsighted than the British. The native element, plus the naturalized Scandinavian, plus a republican form of government, goes far toward making the issues of strikes broader than one finds them in England. American sailors take an important part in the international conferences; at a recent one held in London, for instance, the American delegate, who was a naturalized Scandinavian, was one of the most practical, hard-headed representatives present.

But, on the whole, unionism has failed at sea, because it has not grasped its opportunity to fight for things which it could and should help to secure, and which are more important than wages and hours of work. Years before the Titanic was constructed, it knew that such ships carried only enough lifeboats to save less than one third of the passengers in case of a wreck; but it did nothing. Nor did it take action to prevent passenger steamers from carrying inflammable cargoes. In England, unionism not only left the installation of wireless apparatus to the generosity of shipowners instead of making it compulsory, but ignored the value of hydrostatic tests of fire-pumps and hose. In no country has it worked to secure the installation aboard ship of the excellent mechanical systems of firecontrol which have long been on the market. It has looked calmly on while ships were built with interior fittings which were far from fireproof. Every day it shirks its responsibility for the

terrible fires which are bound to occur at sea so long as conditions remain unchanged.

It allows ships to be manned by coolies who do not understand their officers' language and who run amuck when trouble confronts them. It watches vessels putting out to sea overloaded, undermanned, and unseaworthy. The burning of the Volturno and its passengers, the sinking of the Titanic and the drowning of over a thousand innocent travelers, are signal proofs of the failure of unionism afloat.

In the Seamen's Union of Great Britain, to be more specific, certain high union officials have never smelt salt water as seamen. The union has not been careful enough to demand ability and efficiency on the part of its members; it has no examinations to test a man's ability to pull an oar, sail a boat, or steer a ship; it gives no lectures on stability, buoyancy, and construction; it gives no demonstrations to show the inflammability of cargoes and of the materials used in the construction of most vessels. It has given its members the impression that only wages

matter.

Not long ago I saw a ship passing though the docks on her way to sea, with a hole bigger than a man's head in one of the lifeboats. The hole was an old one. A government nautical surveyor, standing beside me, pointed the hole out to me. He was powerless to interfere, since the matter lay beyond his jurisdiction. Such cases as this are as plentiful as berries, and yet unionism has made no fight for better legal supervision and inspection. So long as its ranks are swollen with paid-up members who are too ignorant to think of anything except agitating for higher wages, unionism seems to care not a straw for the efficiency of these members and for the safety of the traveling public.

As an officer aboard a British ship, a keen unionist and socialist, I deplore the fact that sheer inertia and apathy may any day contribute toward another ocean tragedy. The sailors must not be left to fight the battle alone. Their efforts are spasmodic; they lack

tenacity of purpose; they understand the situation only dimly, and unionism has taught them little. The unions having failed, the public must act, and see to it that the awful accidents of the past few years are not repeated and classed as 'acts of God.'

ISOLATED and avoided, the high-explosive plant lies half hidden in a waste of sloughs and sand-dunes. Like the barren country that surrounds it, the plant itself seems a part of desolate nature, stunted and storm-beaten as the wind-swept hills. Against the straight line of the horizon rise no massive structures of steel or stone; no sound of man or machine breaks the soft stillness; no smoke clouds stain the blue of the autumn sky. Half buried in the rolling sand, a hundred small green buildings scatter in wild disorder along winding paths among the scrub oaks. The voices of undisturbed wild fowl rise from the fens and marshland.

In the little office at the gate I left my matches and put on a pair of wooden-pegged powder shoes. Outside, the faint flavor of last night's frost freshened the morning air, and above the red and yellow of the scrub oaks the autumn sun was shining in a pale blue sky.

At my side, the superintendent was explaining the processes of manufacture which I was soon to see; but my mind was curiously unresponsive; in the peace of the morning air an omin

ous presence seemed to surround me; an invisible force that needed but a spark or the slightest impulse to awaken it, annihilating and devastating in its sudden fury.

Beyond the office, like the letter 'S,' a high sand-dune bent in a general eastand-west direction, a sweep of marshland in each sheltering curve. Against the outer bank of its first wide crescent the small power plant and a row of red one-story buildings marked a single street. From the open door of the power-house the rhythmic drone of a generator accentuated the stillness. Down a track between the buildings a horse plodded slowly over the worn ties, dragging a small flat car, the driver leaning lazily against one of the uprights which supported a dingy awning.

The manufacture of dynamite consists of two separate processes which are conducted individually up to a certain point, when their products meet, and by their union the actual dynamite is produced. In the little buildings by the power-house the first of these products was in process of manufacture. Here the fine wood-dust, mixed with other materials, was prepared, — an

absorbent to hold the nitroglycerin which was being made half a mile beyond the nearest sand-dune. Packed in paper cartridges the nitroglycerinsoaked 'dope,' or sawdust, is called by a single name dynamite.

In two great open pans, slowly revolving paddles were turning over and over a mass of wood-pulp, fine and soft as snow. The room was warm from the sunshine on the low roof and the drying fires below the pans; there was a strong clean smell of sawdust. The building was deserted; unattended, the paddles swung noiselessly with the low sound of well-oiled machinery.

Inside the next building a couple of men were weighing great measures of white powder from bins along the wall. The superintendent picked up a printed slip from a desk by the window.

'Nitrate of soda, nitrate of ammonia, wood-pulp, marble-dust. That's the formula for this batch. Sometimes we put in sulphur, or flour, or magnesium carbonate. It's all according to what kind of an explosive is wanted,-what it's to be used for.'

Far down at the end of the little street the strong, hot smell of paraffine hung heavy in the air. Inside, against the walls of the building, the paper cartridges were drying; racks of waxed yellow tubes half filled the building.

Here the first process of manufacture was completed. Stable and harmless, the fragrant wood-dust was being prepared for its union with that strange evanescent spirit which would endow it with powers of lightning strength and rapidity.

With our powder shoes sinking in the sliding sand we climbed the path to the top of the hill which marked the centre of the twisted dune. On its summit the frame building of the nitrater notched the sky. Here in the silence between earth and clouds, a mighty force was seeking birth.

Perched on a high stool, an old man in overalls bent intently over the top of a great tank, his eyes fixed on a thermometer which protruded from its cover. Above, a shaft and slowly turning wheels moved quietly in the shadows of the roof. There was a splashing of churning liquid, and the bite of acid sharpened the air.

The old man turned his head for a moment to nod to us. Below his feet a coil of pipes white with a thick frost rime entered the bottom of the tank, a cooling solution to keep the temperature of the churning acid within the limit of safety.

As we stepped inside the doorway the splashing grew louder; the bitter reek of the acid seemed to scorch my nostrils. Slowly the old man turned a valve beside him and a thick trickle of glycerine flowed heavily into an opening in the top of the tank. Inside the blackened caldron a strange transformation was in progress. Were the glycerine allowed to become completely nitrated by the acid, the windows of the distant city would rattle in the blast which would surely follow. Carefully, the nitrating must be brought almost to that danger point and abruptly arrested; so near that later in the form of dynamite the nitrating could be instantly completed and the desired explosive obtained by the jarring impulse of an electric spark. Like a child pushing a dish to poise on the table edge, the old man was bringing this dynamic mixture to a precarious balance.

The superintendent pointed to a cistern filled with water just behind the nitrater.

. 'Before we had the brine pipes to keep the acid cool, it used to heat up occasionally. It gives up red fumes when it passes the danger point. You ought to see the quick work Old Charley used to do, that faucet in open the nitrater to let the acid and glycer