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Updated: June 18, 2025
His mind seemed to turn, on the instant, into a vast camera obscura, and he saw arrayed around his consciousness endless pictures from his life, of stoke-holes and forecastles, camps and beaches, jails and boozing-kens, fever-hospitals and slum streets, wherein the thread of association was the fashion in which he had been addressed in those various situations.
But I had no opportunity for looking about the garden, for Mr Solomon led the way at once to the stoke-holes down behind the glass-houses, rattled open the doors, and gave a stoke here with a great iron rod, and a poke there where the fires were caked together; while, without waiting to be asked, I seized upon the shovel I saw handy and threw on some coke.
And he prescribed for them for their culture, I mean this treatment: "To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas."
On putting-green and around bunkers these idlers struggled with artificial difficulties, while in shops and mines and factories, on railways and in the blazing Hells of stoke-holes, men of another class, a slave-class, labored and agonized, toiled and died that these might wear fine linen and spend the long June afternoon in play.
To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.
To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas."
The odyssey of the coal that was lifted high out of ships on the tide beyond, to fall ultimately into the furnaces within, scarcely touched by the hand-wielded shovel, was by itself epical. Fresh air pouring in at the rate of twenty-four million cubic feet per hour cooled the entire palace, and gave to these stoke-holes the uncanny quality of refrigerators.
There cannot be the smallest doubt it will be realised, and when the young dukes, landed proprietors, financiers, motorists, officers in the Guards, barristers, and curates are marched off in gangs to their apportioned labour in the stoke-holes, coal-mines, and December fishing fleets, how the workmen will laugh, how exult!
And it is here that James urges, as his "moral equivalent of war," the conscription of our young men "to coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, to the frames of sky-scrapers," there to pay "their blood-tax in the immemorial human warfare against nature."
The unhappy men who were working in the stoke-holes and tending the furnaces were the sufferers by this catastrophe. Believing that one of the boilers had exploded, fears were entertained that the whole body of stokers and engineers attending the paddle engines were killed. Mr Trotman went down the air-shaft communicating with the other boilers.
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