New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1914-05-16
The NAVY.


CHILDREN OF THE DEAD END. The
Autobiography OF an Irish Navy. BY
Patrick MacGill. Emo, PIP. sos. l.. T.
Dutton & Co.
Mr. MacGills book has attracted con-
siderable attention in England as a
picture Of the navy, the unskilled
laborer who drifts from job to job
often dangerous, always underpaid.
with stretches of unemployment that
are passed in tramping from place to
place looking for work, the minimum
on which life can be sustained being
obtained during these pilgrimages by
begging and petty stealing. The con-
ditions here depicted are far worse than
any known to exist with us, even after
many volumes devoted to our own
disinherited-chiefiy immigrants. The
greatest difference which this chroni-
Gle reveals between conditions there
and here is the utter absence of a
consciousness of opportunity in the
English NAVY. He does not aspire TO
better things as within the range of
possibility; at best he sometimes idly
speculates upon them as dreams in his
wearied hours of rest He is the bond
slave of an iron economic system.
Better times may be coming, but not
before we are dead" says Moleskin
Joe, the philosopher of these pager.
What the author tells us he has
seen and been. He is bitter in his
denunciation of the system from which
he has escaped. The priest and the
landlord in his native Irish village,
the employer and the clergy in England
these are the immediate enemies he
sees. Religion is to him the servant
of capital, which is, of course, not
strikingly new. In fact, Mr.. MacGill
has no remedy to offer worth serious
consideration. Most of the way he is
content to let the hopeless realism of
his story carry its own moral. One
curious observation he makes. and
that is the dwindling of the flame of
manhood as he proceeds from the Irish
and the Scotch navyies to those of
England:
did not find much pleasure in the
company of my new mates lin London.
They were a spineless and ignorant crowd
of men, who believed in clersycraft
psalm-sirging, and hymn-hooting. Not
one Of them had the pluck TO raise his
hands in stand-up fight, or his voice in
protest against the conditions under
which he labored. What difference
between these men and my devil-may-
care comrades of kinlOchlpXHnl
II is a raw picture of restitution and
EQUALIZATION, of hardship. fatigue and
filth. "a man may be better than
his surroundings. but never cleaner"
says Moleskin Joe, and in the circum-
stances he is right. for this is also
picture of an almost incredible indif-
ference toward the most primitive de-
cencies of life among the navvies on
the part of British employers, whether
they be farmers harvesting or railroads
repairing their tracks. The amuse-
ments Of these people are as rude and
dreary as the way in which they must
live-alcohol, fighting, gambling Mr..
MacGilPs hero (avowedly himselG is
almost boastfully proud of his proves
al a fighter. With all his degradation
the navy is. however. and notwith-
standing the foulness OF his tongue,
man of clean moral life, if only because
women, even the lowest. scorn him.
The fiction of the book is tenuous; in
fact, il might have been stronger with
out this element. The story of Norah.
sent to the harvesting in Scotland to
help earn the rent, lost in her inno-
cence, and found at last on the Glas-
gov pavement, only serves TO bring the
volume to an end Gourock Ellen, the
woman of the streets grown too old to
ply her calling, interests one more, but
on the whole. women play hut an Incl
dental part in the story. Mr.. MacGill
impresses and holds his reader by mere
strength of the naked truth he tells.
No wonder his book has passed through
three editions in two weeks among the
English, whom it concerns so closely.
And he can write. His sensitiveness to
beauty has survived the process OF
hardening which began when he was
fwelve wears old The early chapters