There is a story concerning Joseph Conrad, that when he became master of a ship, he conceived a desire to bring her home through the Torres Straits, which are especially dangerous waters. He had the fantastic idea that he wanted to sail in them, because he had read stories about them. The owners permitted him to have his way, and the critics and reviewers are thrilled by this sign of “romance” in ship owners. Critics and reviewers, you see, are sweet and innocent souls; only an evil-minded “muck-rake man” would make inquiries as to the age of that ship and the amount of insurance she carried through the Torres Straits! The capitalist shipping industry is full of facts of this sort. Take, for example, the “Plimsoll line.” There was an English workingman who became a rich manufacturer, and did not forget his class, but devoted his life to trying to save the seamen and officers who were sent out in these “coffin ships.” He was elected to Parliament, and brought in a bill providing that ships should not be loaded beyond a certain line--the “Plimsoll line,” it was called. When his fellow-members voted it down, he shook his fist at them and called them “villains.” Of course they were shocked, and wanted to expel him, but they didn’t quite dare; they gave him ten days to think it over, and then he apologized, and they passed his bill--a most admirable form of compromise for a reformer! For a generation after this, as cold statistics showed, some thousands of British seamen and officers escaped all the cruelties of Nature, the stealthy Nemesis of Joseph Conrad. For years this “Plimsoll line” served these thousands of seamen and officers in place of the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Gentle Jesus meek and mild, the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and likewise all the Saints in the calendar, the glorious company of the Apostles, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets, the noble Army of Martyrs, the heavenly choir of Angels and Archangels, the Cherubim and Seraphim, and the Holy Church throughout all the world. But this divine supervision cost British shipping owners a certain number of millions of pounds of profit every year, and so they paid the campaign funds of their Tory and Liberal parties and got their henchman, David Lloyd-George, in authority and repealed that law; so now those thousands of seamen and officers are once more falling victims to the stealthy Nemesis! And Joseph Conrad--what has he to say about this? As a man of the sea, he knows the facts; and in “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” that most cruel-souled book, he takes occasion to pour his jeering scorn upon those who try to save the lives of seamen. You have to read the actual text to get the full effect of his venom. A seaman is talking: