At eight-thirty, more men with tickets were admitted, and by nine the little gate was opened to us.  We crushed through somehow, and found ourselves packed in a courtyard like sardines.  On more occasions than one, as a Yankee tramp in Yankeeland, I have had to work for my breakfast; but for no breakfast did I ever work so hard as for this one.  For over two hours I had waited outside, and for over another hour I waited in this packed courtyard.  I had had nothing to eat all night, and I was weak and faint, while the smell of the soiled clothes and unwashed bodies, steaming from pent animal heat, and blocked solidly about me, nearly turned my stomach.  So tightly were we packed, that a number of the men took advantage of the opportunity and went soundly asleep standing up.

Now, about the Salvation Army in general I know nothing, and whatever criticism I shall make here is of that particular portion of the Salvation Army which does business on Blackfriars Road near the Surrey Theatre.  In the first place, this forcing of men who have been up all night to stand on their feet for hours longer, is as cruel as it is needless.  We were weak, famished, and exhausted from our night’s hardship and lack of sleep, and yet there we stood, and stood, and stood, without rhyme or reason.

Sailors were very plentiful in this crowd.  It seemed to me that one man in four was looking for a ship, and I found at least a dozen of them to be American sailors.  In accounting for their being “on the beach,” I received the same story from each and all, and from my knowledge of sea affairs this story rang true.  English ships sign their sailors for the voyage, which means the round trip, sometimes lasting as long as three years; and they cannot sign off and receive their discharges until they reach the home port, which is England.  Their wages are low, their food is bad, and their treatment worse.  Very often they are really forced by their captains to desert in the New World or the colonies, leaving a handsome sum of wages behind them—­a distinct gain, either to the captain or the owners, or to both.  But whether for this reason alone or not, it is a fact that large numbers of them desert.  Then, for the home voyage, the ship engages whatever sailors it can find on the beach.  These men are engaged at the somewhat higher wages that obtain in other portions of the world, under the agreement that they shall sign off on reaching England.  The reason for this is obvious; for it would be poor business policy to sign them for any longer time, since seamen’s wages are low in England, and England is always crowded with sailormen on the beach.  So this fully accounted for the American seamen at the Salvation Army barracks.  To get off the beach in other outlandish places they had come to England, and gone on the beach in the most outlandish place of all.