In darkness, only punctuated by the dim light of a safety-lamp, in an atmosphere composed of the exhalations from the coal and a modicum of dust-laden air, liable at any moment to be overwhelmed by the down-rushing masses of coal as the ship's motion displaces it, the grimy, sweat-soaked man works on. By comparison with him the coal-hewer in the mine has a gentleman's life. Darkness and danger and want of breath are his inevitable environment. What wonder is it that he becomes a hard citizen? The fact is that no man with longings for decent life would or could remain in such employment. Only those who by carelessness and disregard of all that for the majority of us makes life worth living stay in it, and enable the ocean traffic of to-day to go on. It is absolutely impossible to exaggerate the miseries of such a mode of life, made necessary by the imperious demand for swift travel. Yet, severe as is the lot of the coal-trimmer in an ocean liner, it again is comparatively easy when compared with the lot of the second-class stoker in her Majesty's Navy. For him another set of conditions comes into play. The necessity for using the coal as a means of protection from shot and shell leads to the bunkers being subdivided into a host of "pockets" holding but a few tons and communicating with each other deviously. The work of getting the coal passed from one to the other of these is far worse than anything of the kind in the Merchant Service, as much worse as is the firing under forced draught for a Belleville boiler than the steady supply of fuel to a well-equipped, natural-draught stokehold of any of our great merchant steamships, where Belleville boilers, thank God, will never be used. And, coming deeper still, there is the firing and trimming of a "destroyer." That occupation defies any attempt to describe it. No words could give an adequately forceful idea of what the firemen, trimmers, and E.R.A.'s must endure in order that a vessel no larger than an above-bridge steamer shall be driven by engines of five thousand horse-power at the rate of thirty miles per hour. We do not seem to have reached finality yet in this direction; but I should think that since human endurance has its limits, there must of necessity be a halt soon from the utter impossibility of finding human beings able to live and work under such awful conditions. When you find the long quivering hull of a destroyer, only a plate of steel not much thicker than a crown piece keeping out the sea, packed full of boilers, whizzing machinery, and coal, the tiny air space left containing something, of which one inhalation would make you or me, reader, feel as if we had been suddenly strangled, and the heat greater than one would find in the hottest room of a Turkish bath, it seems time to consider whether there can be any justification in compelling our fellow creatures, whom the need for bread has driven to accept such employment, to endure imprisonment like that, let alone _work_ in it.