"Of course, I'd rather go as a soldier, but I've got no right to. I can ride or walk all day, and shoot straight and stand all kinds of weather, and killing Germans would just about tickle me to death. But this is a time when every man has got to do what he can do better than he can do anything else. And I've spent my life in shipyards. "I was a common laborer first--swinging a sledge; I had an arm then! That was before we had compressed-air riveters. I was a union man and went on strike and fought scabs and made the bosses eat crow. Now I'm one of the bosses. I'm what they call a capitalist and an oppressor of labor. Now I put down strikes and fight the unions--not that I don't believe in 'em, not that I don't know where labor was before they had unions and where it would be without 'em to-day and to-morrow, but because all these things have to be adjusted gradually, and because the main thing, after all, is building ships--just now, of course, especially. "When I was a workman I took pride in my job, and I thought I was an artist at it. I wouldn't take anybody's lip. Now that I'm a boss I have to take everybody's lip, because I can't strike. I can't go to my boss and demand higher wages and easier hours, because my boss is the market. But I don't suppose there's anything on earth that interests you less than labor problems." "They might if I knew the first thing about them." "Well, the first thing is that they are the next war, the big war after this one's over. The job is to keep it down till peace comes. Then hell will pop--if you'll pardon my French. I'm all for labor getting its rights, but some of the men don't want the right to work--they want the right to loaf. I say let the sky be the limit of any man's opportunity--the sky and his own limitations and ambitions. But a lot of the workmen don't want opportunity; they've got no ambition; they hate to build things. They talk about the terrible conditions their families live in, and how gorgeously the rich men live. But the rich men were poor once, and the poor can be rich--if they can and will. "The war is going to be the fight between the makers and the breakers, the uplifters and the down-draggers, you might say. And it's going to be some war! "The men on the wrong side--what I call the wrong side, at least--are just as much our enemies as the Germans. We've got to watch 'em just as close. They'd just as soon burn an unfinished ship as the Germans would sink her when she's on her way. "That little ship I'm building now! Would you believe it? It has to be guarded every minute. Most of our men are all right. They'd work themselves to death for the ship, and they pour out their sweat like prayers. But sneaks get in among 'em, and it only takes a fellow with a bomb one minute to undo the six months' work of a hundred." "Tell me about your ship," she said. A ship she could understand. It was personal and real; labor theories were as foreign to her as problems in metaphysics.