The Jungle quotes

… made in the forests of Lithuania is hard to apply in the stockyards district of Chicago, with its quarter of a million inhabitants, still they did their best, and the children who ran in from the street, and even the dogs, went out again happier.

A charming informality was one of the characteristics of this celebration.

The men wore their hats, or, if they wished, they took them off, and their coats with them; they ate when and where they pleased, and moved as often as they pleased.

A pair of military trousers, light blue with a yellow stripe, serve to give that suggestion of authority proper to the leader of a band.

He is only about five feet high, but even so these trousers are about eight inches short of the ground.

You wonder where he can have gotten them—or rather you would wonder, if the excitement of being in his presence left you time to think of such things.

Marija is short, but powerful in build. She works in a canning factory, and all day long she handles cans of beef that weigh fourteen pounds. She has a broad Slavic face, with prominent red cheeks.

When she opens her mouth, it is tragical, but you cannot help thinking of a horse.

She wears a blue flannel shirtwaist, which is now rolled up at the sleeves, disclosing her brawny arms; she has a carving-fork in her hand, with which she pounds on the table to mark the time.

The last time, too, he lost his job, and that meant six weeks more of standing at the doors of the packinghouses, at six o’clock on bitter winter mornings, with a foot of snow on the ground and more in the air.

There are learned people who can tell you out of the statistics that beef-boners make forty cents an hour, but, perhaps, these people have never looked into a beef-boner’s hands.

When Tamoszius and his companions stop for a rest, as perforce they must, now and then, the dancers halt where they are and wait patiently. They never seem to tire; and there is no place for them to sit down if they did.

Passing through the doorway the door smote him full, and the shriek which followed brought the dancing to a halt.

Marija, who threatened horrid murder a hundred times a day, and would weep over the injury of a fly, seized little Sebastijonas in her arms and bid fair to smother him with kisses.

There was a long rest for the orchestra, and plenty of refreshments, while Marija was making her peace with her victim, seating him upon the bar, and standing beside him and holding to his lips a foaming schooner of beer.

He has to be prompt—for these two-o’clock-in-the-morning fights, if they once get out of hand, are like a forest fire, and may mean the whole reserves at the station.

The thing to do is to crack every fighting head that you see, before there are so many fighting heads that you cannot crack any of them.

There is but scant account kept of cracked heads in back of the yards, for men who have to crack the heads of animals all day seem to get into the habit, and to practise on their friends, and even on their families, between times.

The thing to do is to crack every fighting head that you see, before there are so many fighting heads that you cannot crack any of them.

There is but scant account kept of cracked heads in back of the yards, for men who have to crack the heads of animals all day seem to get into the habit, and to practise on their friends, and even on their families, between times.

This makes it a cause for congratulation that by modern methods a very few men can do the painfully necessary work of head-cracking for the whole of the cultured world.

There is no exception to this rule, not even little Ona—who has asked for a holiday the day after her wedding day, a holiday without pay, and been refused.

While there are so many who are anxious to work as you wish, there is no occasion for incommoding yourself with those who must work otherwise.

Little Ona is nearly ready to faint—and half in a stupor herself, because of the heavy scent in the room. She has not taken a drop, but everyone else there is literally burning alcohol, as the lamps are burning oil;

Jurgis talked lightly about work, because he was young.

They told him stories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards of Chicago, and of what had happened to them afterwards—stories to make your flesh creep, but Jurgis would only laugh.

Jurgis was like a boy, a boy from the country.

He was the sort of man the bosses like to get hold of, the sort they make it a grievance they cannot get hold of.

When he was told to go to a certain place, he would go there on the run. When he had nothing to do for the moment, he would stand round fidgeting, dancing, with the overflow of energy that was in him.

… about the country, and had no one to tell them, and it was easy for a man in a blue uniform to lead them away, and to take them to a hotel and keep them there, and make them pay enormous charges to get away.

The law says that the rate-card shall be on the door of a hotel, but it does not say that it shall be in Lithuanian.

It was in the stockyards that Jonas’s friend had gotten rich, and so to Chicago the party was bound. They knew that one word, Chicago—and that was all they needed to know, at least, until they reached the city.

down a side street there were two rows of brick houses, and between them a vista: half a dozen chimneys, tall as the tallest of buildings, touching the very sky—and leaping from them half a dozen columns of smoke, thick, oily, and black as night.

It might have come from the centre of the world, this smoke, where the fires of the ages still smoulder.

It came as if self-impelled, driving all before it, a perpetual explosion. It was inexhaustible; one stared, waiting to see it stop, but still the great streams rolled out. They spread in vast clouds overhead, writhing, curling;

You scarcely noticed it at first—it sunk into your consciousness, a vague disturbance, a trouble. It was like the murmuring of the bees in the spring, the whisperings of the forest; it suggested endless activity, the rumblings of a world in motion.

It was only by an effort that one could realize that it was made by animals, that it was the distant lowing of ten thousand cattle, the distant grunting of ten thousand swine.

They would have liked to follow it up, but, alas, they had no time for adventures just then. The policeman on the corner was beginning to watch them; and so, as usual, they started up the street.

you could not enter by the front door at all, owing to the mattresses, and when you tried to go up the backstairs you found that she had walled up most of the porch with old boards to make a place to keep her chickens.

It was a standing jest of the boarders that Aniele cleaned house by letting the chickens loose in the rooms.

Undoubtedly this did keep down the vermin, but it seemed probable, in view of all the circumstances, that the old lady regarded it rather as feeding the chickens than as cleaning the rooms.

After a few years the unpleasant effect of this would pass away, it was said; but meantime, in hot weather—and especially when it rained—the flies were apt to be annoying.

Was it not unhealthful? the stranger would ask, and the residents would answer, “Perhaps; but there is no telling.”

A little way further on, and Jurgis and Ona, staring open-eyed and wondering, came to the place where this “made” ground was in process of making.

Sometimes visitors from the packinghouses would wander out to see this “dump,” and they would stand by and debate as to whether the children were eating the food they got, or merely collecting it for the chickens at home.

Apparently none of them ever went down to find out.

Beyond this dump there stood a great brickyard, with smoking chimneys. First they took out the soil to make bricks, and then they filled it up again with garbage, which seemed to Jurgis and Ona a felicitous arrangement, characteristic of an enterprising country like America.

Jokubas did this with the air of a country gentleman escorting a party of visitors over his estate; he was an old-time resident, and all these wonders had grown up under his eyes, and he had a personal pride in them.

The packers might own the land, but he claimed the landscape, and there was no one to say nay to this.

They passed down the busy street that led to the yards. It was still early morning, and everything was at its high tide of activity.

“They don’t waste anything here,” said the guide, and then he laughed and added a witticism, which he was pleased that his unsophisticated friends should take to be his own: “

They use everything about the hog except the squeal.

” In front of Brown’s General Office building there grows a tiny plot of grass, and this, you may learn, is the only bit of green thing in Packingtown;

It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated.

It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics.

And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests—and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it;

Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering-machine ran on, visitors or no visitors.

It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.

One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe.

Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering-machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.

One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe.

Was it permitted to believe that there was nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for hogs, where they were requited for all this suffering? Each one of these hogs was a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black;

One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe.

Was it permitted to believe that there was nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for hogs, where they were requited for all this suffering?

Each one of these hogs was a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were brown, some were spotted; some were old, some were young; some were long and lean, some were monstrous.

there was a building where the skins were dried and tanned, there was another where heads and feet were made into glue, and another where bones were made into fertilizer.

No tiniest particle of organic matter was wasted in Durham’s.

Out of the horns of the cattle they made combs, buttons, hairpins, and imitation ivory; out of the shin bones and other big bones they cut knife and toothbrush handles, and mouthpieces for pipes;

It even quoted “Home, Sweet Home,” and made bold to translate it into Polish—though for some reason it omitted the Lithuanian of this.

Perhaps the translator found it a difficult matter to be sentimental in a language in which a sob is known as a gukcziojimas and a smile as a nusiszypsojimas.

Over this document the family pored long, while Ona spelled out its contents. It appeared that this house contained four rooms, besides a basement, and that it might be bought for fifteen hundred dollars, the lot and all.

… had such a task before him would not need to look very far in Packingtown—he had only to walk up the avenue and read the signs, or get into a streetcar, to obtain full information as to pretty much everything a human creature could need.

It was quite touching, the zeal of people to see that his health and happiness were provided for.

Did the person wish to smoke? There was a little discourse about cigars, showing him exactly why the Thomas Jefferson Five-cent Perfecto was the only cigar worthy of the name. Had he, on the other hand, smoked too much?

He meant to take one side out of these tomorrow, and put shelves in them, and make them into bureaus and places to keep things for the bedrooms.

The nest which had been advertised had not included feathers for quite so many birds as there were in this family.

They had, of course, put their dining-table in the kitchen, and the dining-room was used as the bedroom of Teta Elzbieta and five of her children.

But Jurgis had no sympathy with such ideas as this—he could do the work himself, and so could the rest of them, he declared, if they were good for anything. If they couldn’t do it, let them go somewhere else.

Jurgis had not studied the books, and he would not have known how to pronounce “laissez-faire”; but he had been round the world enough to know that a man has to shift for himself in it, and that if he gets the worst of it, there is nobody to listen to him holler.

Yet there have been known to be philosophers and plain men who swore by Malthus in the books, and would, nevertheless, subscribe to a relief fund in time of a famine.

She was a wrinkled-up and wizened personage—she must have been eighty—and as she mumbled the grim story through her toothless gums, she seemed a very old witch to them.

Grandmother Majauszkiene had lived in the midst of misfortune so long that it had come to be her element, and she talked about starvation, sickness, and death as other people might about weddings and holidays.

The thing came gradually. In the first place as to the house they had bought, it was not new at all, as they had supposed;

The Poles, who had come by tens of thousands, had been driven to the wall by the Lithuanians, and now the Lithuanians were giving way to the Slovaks.

Who there was poorer and more miserable than the Slovaks, Grandmother Majauszkiene had no idea, but the packers would find them, never fear.

It was easy to bring them, for wages were really much higher, and it was only when it was too late that the poor people found out that everything else was higher too. They were like rats in a trap, that was the truth;

It was easy to bring them, for wages were really much higher, and it was only when it was too late that the poor people found out that everything else was higher too.

They were like rats in a trap, that was the truth; and more of them were piling in every day.

By and by they would have their revenge, though, for the thing was getting beyond human endurance, and the people would rise and murder the packers. Grandmother Majauszkiene was a socialist, or some such strange thing;

when wonder burned in their hearts, and leaped into flame at the slightest breath. They were shaken to the depths of them, with the awe of love realized—and was it so very weak of them that they cried out for a little peace?

They had opened their hearts, like flowers to the springtime, and the merciless winter had fallen upon them.

They wondered if ever any love that had blossomed in the world had been so crushed and trampled!

She was so sensitive—she was not fitted for such a life as this; and a hundred times a day, when he thought of her, he would clench his hands and fling himself again at the task before him.

She was too good for him, he told himself, and he was afraid, because she was his.

So long he had hungered to possess her, but now that the time had come he knew that he had not earned the right; that she trusted him so was all her own simple goodness, and no virtue of his.

He was all that she had to look to, and if he failed she would be lost; he would wrap his arms about her, and try to hide her from the world. He had learned the ways of things about him now.

It was a war of each against all, and the devil take the hindmost.

You did not give feasts to other people, you waited for them to give feasts to you. You went about with your soul full of suspicion and hatred;

He had learned the ways of things about him now. It was a war of each against all, and the devil take the hindmost. You did not give feasts to other people, you waited for them to give feasts to you.

You went about with your soul full of suspicion and hatred; you understood that you were environed by hostile powers that were trying to get your money, and who used all the virtues to bait their traps with.

The storekeepers plastered up their windows with all sorts of lies to entice you; the very fences by the wayside, the lampposts and telegraph-poles, were pasted over with lies.

Ona was a working-girl, and did not own waterproofs and such things, and so Jurgis took her and put her on the streetcar.

Now it chanced that this carline was owned by gentlemen who were trying to make money.

And the city having passed an ordinance requiring them to give transfers, they had fallen into a rage; and first they had made a rule that transfers could be had only when the fare was paid;

Their children were not as well as they had been at home; but how could they know that there was no sewer to their house, and that the drainage of fifteen years was in a cesspool under it?

How could they know that the pale blue milk that they bought around the corner was watered, and doctored with formaldehyde besides?

When the children were not well at home, Teta Elzbieta would gather herbs and cure them; now she was obliged to go to the drugstore and buy extracts—and how was she to know that they were all adulterated?

Now the dreadful winter was come upon them.

In the forests, all summer long, the branches of the trees do battle for light, and some of them lose and die; and then come the raging blasts, and the storms of snow and hail, and strew the ground with these weaker branches.

Just so it was in Packingtown; the whole district braced itself for the struggle that was an agony, and those whose time was come died off in hordes. All the year round they had been serving as cogs in the great packing-machine;

There came pneumonia and grippe, stalking among them, seeking for weakened constitutions; there was the annual harvest of those whom tuberculosis had been dragging down. There came cruel, cold, and biting winds, and blizzards of snow, all testing relentlessly for failing muscles and impoverished blood.

Sooner or later came the day when the unfit one did not report for work; and then, with no time lost in waiting, and no inquiries or regrets, there was a chance for a new hand.

The new hands were here by the thousands. All day long the gates of the packinghouses were besieged by starving and penniless men; they came, literally, by the thousands every single morning, fighting with each other for a chance for life.

On the morrow, before daybreak, there were three thousand at Durham’s, and the police-reserves had to be sent for to quell the riot.

Then Durham’s bosses picked out twenty of the biggest; the “two hundred” proved to have been a printer’s error.

Four or five miles to the eastward lay the lake, and over this the bitter winds came raging.

… such places—and it was the men who worked in these who ran the most risk of all, because whenever they had to pass to another room they had to go through ice-cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing on above the waist except a sleeveless undershirt.

On the killing-beds you were apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if you leaned against a pillar, you would freeze to that, and if you put your hand upon the blade of your knife, you would run a chance of leaving your skin on it.

The men would tie up their feet in newspapers and old sacks, and these would be soaked in blood and frozen, and then soaked again, and so on, until by nighttime a man would be walking on great lumps the size of the feet of …

and how this man had jilted his girl, and how she had quarrelled with the other girl, and what had passed between them; and how another man beat his wife, and spent all her earnings upon drink, and pawned her very clothes.

Some people would have scorned this talk as gossip; but then one has to talk about what one knows.

It was one Saturday night, as they were coming home from a wedding, that Tamoszius found courage, and set down his violin-case in the street and spoke his heart; and then Marija clasped him in her arms.

In other words, in the union Jurgis learned to talk politics. In the place where he had come from there had not been any politics—in Russia one thought of the government as an affliction like the lightning and the hail.

“Duck, little brother, duck,” the wise old peasants would whisper; “everything passes away.”

And when Jurgis had first come to America he had supposed that it was the same. He had heard people say that it was a free country—but what did that mean?

he was building a block of flats somewhere up on Ashland Avenue, and the man who was overseeing it for him was drawing pay as a city inspector of sewers.

The city inspector of water-pipes had been dead and buried for over a year, but somebody was still drawing his pay.

The city inspector of sidewalks was a barkeeper at the War-Whoop café—and maybe he could not make it uncomfortable for any tradesman who did not stand in with Scully!

There was no escaping; you might provide all your doors and windows with screens, but their buzzing outside would be like the swarming of bees, and whenever you opened the door they would rush in as if a storm of wind were driving them.

Perhaps the summertime suggests to you thoughts of the country, visions of green fields and mountains and sparkling lakes. It had no such suggestion for the people in the yards.

The great packing-machine ground on remorselessly, without thinking of green fields; and the men and women and children who were part of it never saw any green thing, not even a flower.

Perhaps the summertime suggests to you thoughts of the country, visions of green fields and mountains and sparkling lakes. It had no such suggestion for the people in the yards.

The great packing-machine ground on remorselessly, without thinking of green fields; and the men and women and children who were part of it never saw any green thing, not even a flower.

Four or five miles to the east of them lay the blue waters of Lake Michigan; but for all the good it did them it might have been as far away as the Pacific Ocean.

but for all the good it did them it might have been as far away as the Pacific Ocean. They had only Sundays, and then they were too tired to walk.

They were tied to the great packing-machine, and tied to it for life.

The managers and superintendents and clerks of Packingtown were all recruited from another class, and never from the workers; they scorned the workers, the very meanest of them.

… there was no more danger of snow, and no more coal to buy, and another room warm enough to put the children into when they cried, and enough money to get along from week to week with, Jurgis was less terrible than he had been.

A man can get used to anything in the course of time, and Jurgis had gotten used to lying about the house.

Ona saw this, and was very careful not to destroy his peace of mind, by letting him know how very much pain she was suffering.

In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he had gotten a job the first day; but now he was secondhand, a damaged article, so to speak, and they did not want him.

They had got the best out of him⁠—they had worn him out, with their speeding-up and their carelessness, and now they had thrown him away!

And Jurgis would make the acquaintance of others of these unemployed men and find that they had all had the same experience. There were some, of course, who had wandered in from other places, who had been ground up in other mills;

The peculiar bitterness of all this was that Jurgis saw so plainly the meaning of it.

In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he had gotten a job the first day; but now he was secondhand, a damaged article, so to speak, and they did not want him.

They had got the best out of him—they had worn him out, with their speeding-up and their carelessness, and now they had thrown him away!

There are all stages of being out of work in Packingtown, and he faced in dread the prospect of reaching the lowest.

There is a place that waits for the lowest man⁠—the fertilizer-plant!

The men would talk about it in awestricken whispers. Not more than one in ten had ever really tried it; the other nine had contented themselves with hearsay evidence and a peep through the door. There were some things worse than even starving to death.

In the dust and the steam the electric lights would shine like far-off twinkling stars—red and blue, green and purple stars, according to the color of the mist and the brew from which it came.

For the odors in these ghastly charnel-houses there may be words in Lithuanian, but there are none in English.

The person entering would have to summon his courage as for a cold-water plunge. He would go on like a man swimming under water; he would put his handkerchief over his face, and begin to cough and choke;

Still, with the memory of his four months’ siege behind him, he fought on, in a frenzy of determination; and half an hour later he began to vomit—he vomited until it seemed as if his inwards must be torn into shreds.

A man could get used to the fertilizer-mill, the boss had said, if he would only make up his mind to it; but Jurgis now began to see that it was a question of making up his stomach.

At the end of that day of horror, he could scarcely stand. He had to catch himself now and then, and lean against a building and get his bearings.

In the midst of the mist, however, the visitor would suddenly notice the tense set face, with the two wrinkles graven in the forehead, and the ghastly pallor of the cheeks; and then he would suddenly recollect that it was time he was going on.

The woman did not go on; she stayed right there⁠—hour after hour, day after day, year after year, twisting sausage-links and racing with death.

It was piecework, and she was apt to have a family to keep alive;

Such were the new surroundings in which Elzbieta was placed, and such was the work she was compelled to do. It was stupefying, brutalizing work; it left her no time to think, no strength for anything.

She was part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence.

There was only one mercy about the cruel grind—that it gave her the gift of insensibility. Little by little she sank into a torpor—she fell silent.

They were so numbed that they did not even suffer much from hunger, now; only the children continued to fret when the food ran short.

Yet the soul of Ona was not dead⁠—the souls of none of them were dead, but only sleeping; and now and then they would waken, and these were cruel times.

The gates of memory would roll open—old joys would stretch out their arms to them, old hopes and dreams would call to them, and they would stir beneath the burden that lay upon them, and feel its forever immeasurable weight.

They could not even cry out beneath it; but anguish would seize them, more dreadful than the agony of death. It was a thing scarcely to be spoken—a thing never spoken by all the world, that will not know its own defeat.

They were beaten; they had lost the game, they were swept aside.

It was not less tragic because it was so sordid, because that it had to do with wages and grocery bills and rents. They had dreamed of freedom; of a chance to look about them and learn something;

Once she cried aloud, and woke Jurgis, who was tired and cross. After that she learned to weep silently—their moods so seldom came together now!

It was as if their hopes were buried in separate graves.

Jurgis, being a man, had troubles of his own. There was another spectre following him. He had never spoken of it, nor would he allow anyone else to speak of it—he had never acknowledged its existence to himself.

He had never spoken of it, nor would he allow anyone else to speak of it—he had never acknowledged its existence to himself. Yet the battle with it took all the manhood that he had—and once or twice, alas, a little more.

Jurgis had discovered drink.

He was working in the steaming pit of hell;

Ten thousand curses upon them and their law! Their justice—it was a lie, it was a lie, a hideous, brutal lie, a thing too black and hateful for any world but a world of nightmares. It was a sham and a loathsome mockery.

There was no justice, there was no right, anywhere in it⁠—it was only force, it was tyranny, the will and the power, reckless and unrestrained!

They had ground him beneath their heel, they had devoured all his substance; they had murdered his old father, they had broken and wrecked his wife, they had crushed and cowed his whole family;

Nay, they would not even have treated a beast as they had treated him! Would any man in his senses have trapped a wild thing in its lair, and left its young behind to die?

These midnight hours were fateful ones to Jurgis; in them was the beginning of his rebellion, of his outlawry and his unbelief.

He had no wit to trace back the social crime to its far sources—he could not say that it was the thing men have called “the system” that was crushing him to the earth;

he, too, had felt the world’s injustice, but instead of bearing it patiently, he had struck back, and struck hard. He was striking all the time—there was war between him and society.

He was a genial freebooter, living off the enemy, without fear or shame.

He was not always victorious, but then defeat did not mean annihilation, and need not break his spirit.

Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded.

They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.

To most of this Jurgis tried not to listen. They frightened him with their savage mockery; and all the while his heart was far away, where his loved ones were calling. Now and then in the midst of it his thoughts would take flight;

She had to bury one of her children—but then she had done it three times before, and each time risen up and gone back to take up the battle for the rest.

Elzbieta was one of the primitive creatures: like the angleworm, which goes on living though cut in half; like a hen, which, deprived of her chickens one by one, will mother the last that is left her.

She did this because it was her nature—she asked no questions about the justice of it, nor the worthwhileness of life in which destruction and death ran riot.

This was “piecework,” of course; and besides it was made certain that the boy did not idle, by setting the machine to match the highest possible speed of human hands.

Thirty thousand of these pieces he handled every day, nine or ten millions every year⁠—how many in a lifetime it rested with the gods to say.

Near by him men sat bending over whirling grindstones, putting the finishing touches to the steel knives of the reaper;

and then his product would be reckoned up by the census-taker, and jubilant captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet-halls, telling how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other country.

If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy; though there are a few other things that are great among us, including our drink-bill, which is a billion and a quarter of dollars a year, and doubling itself every decade.

There was a machine which stamped out the iron plates, and then another which, with a mighty thud, mashed them to the shape of the sitting-down portion of the American farmer.

Incandescent rainbows shone above it, blue, red, and golden lights played about it; but the stream itself was white, ineffable.

Out of regions of wonder it streamed, the very river of life; and the soul leaped up at the sight of it, fled back upon it, swift and resistless, back into far-off lands, where beauty and terror dwell.

—Then the great cauldron tilted back again, empty, and Jurgis saw to his relief that no one was hurt, and turned and followed his guide out into the sunlight.

And meantime his father had thought the last thought about him that he meant to; he was going to think of himself, he was going to fight for himself, against the world that had baffled him and tortured him!

So he went on, tearing up all the flowers from the garden of his soul, and setting his heel upon them.

The train thundered deafeningly, and a storm of dust blew in his face;

But Jurgis was not staying.

He was a free man now, a buccaneer.

The old wanderlust had got into his blood, the joy of the unbound life, the joy of seeking, of hoping without limit. There were mishaps and discomforts—but at least there was always something new;

They were of the triumphant and insolent possessors; they had a hall, and a fire, and food and clothing and money, and so they might preach to hungry men, and the hungry men must be humble and listen!

They were trying to save their souls⁠—and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?

At eleven the meeting closed, and the desolate audience filed out into the snow, muttering curses up on the few traitors who had got repentance and gone upon the platform.

Then when he got one, he would dart round the corner and return to his base to get warm; and his victim, seeing him do this, would go away, vowing that he would never give a cent to a beggar again.

The victim never paused to ask where else Jurgis could have gone under the circumstances⁠—where he, the victim, would have gone.

At the saloon Jurgis could not only get more food and better food than he could buy in any restaurant for the same money, but a drink in the bargain to warm him up.

also he had no overcoat, and shivered pitifully. But, alas, it was again the case of the honest merchant, who finds that the genuine and unadulterated article is driven to the wall by the artistic counterfeit.

Jurgis, as a beggar, was simply a blundering amateur in competition with organized and scientific professionalism.

He was just out of the hospital—but the story was worn threadbare, and how could he prove it? He had his arm in a sling—and it was a device a regular beggar’s little boy would have scorned.

The speaker sank into one of the big armchairs, and Admiral Dewey crouched beneath it; he did not snarl again, but he never took his eyes off Jurgis.

He was perfectly sober, was the Admiral.

The butler had closed the door, and he stood by it, watching Jurgis every second. Now there came footsteps outside, and, as he opened the door a man in livery entered, carrying a folding-table, and behind him two men with covered trays.

In the Bridewell Jurgis met few who had been there the last time, but he met scores of others, old and young, of exactly the same sort.

It was like breakers upon a beach; there was new water, but the wave looked just the same.

He strolled about and talked with them, and the biggest of them told tales of their prowess, while those who were weaker, or younger and inexperienced, gathered round and listened in admiring silence.

but the other laughed coolly—it was the way of the game, and there was no helping it. Before long Jurgis would think no more of it than they did in the yards of knocking out a bullock. “

It’s a case of us or the other fellow, and I say the other fellow every time

,” he observed.

And Jurgis turned red with embarrassment.

He had forgotten that a blacklist did not exist.

“I—that is—I had difficulty in getting a place,” he stammered.

and if a man lay off and forgot to come back there was nothing to be gained by seeking him, for all the rest would quit in the meantime.

Everything went, during the strike, and the packers paid.

Before long Jurgis found that the custom of resting had suggested to some alert minds the possibility of registering at more than one place and earning more than one five dollars a day.

Then there were yells and hoots, continuing until at last the superintendent came to the door. “We all go back or none of us do!” cried a hundred voices. And the other shook his fist at them, and shouted, “

You went out of here like cattle, and like cattle you’ll come back!

”

Everywhere he went, from one end of the vast city to the other, there were hundreds of others like him; everywhere was the sight of plenty—and the merciless hand of authority waving them away.

There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.

When he was down to his last quarter, Jurgis learned that before the bakeshops closed at night they sold out what was left at half price, and after that he would go and get two loaves of stale bread for a nickel, and break them …

At the station-house Jurgis gave a Polish name and was put into a cell with half a dozen others; and while these sat and talked in whispers, he lay down in a corner and gave himself up to his thoughts.

Jurgis had looked into the deepest reaches of the social pit, and grown used to the sights in them.

Yet when he had thought of all humanity as vile and hideous, he had somehow always excepted his own family, that he had loved; and now this sudden horrible discovery—Marija a whore, and Elzbieta and the children living off her shame!

And then suddenly came a voice in his ear, a woman’s voice, gentle and sweet,

“If you would try to listen, comrade, perhaps you would be interested.”

Jurgis was more startled by that than he would have been by the touch of a policeman. He still kept his eyes fixed ahead, and did not stir; but his heart gave a great leap. Comrade! Who was it that called him “comrade”?

It must be something that the man was saying, up there on the platform. What sort of a man was he? And what sort of a thing was this, anyhow?—So all at once it occurred to Jurgis to look at the speaker.

It was like coming suddenly upon some wild sight of nature⁠—a mountain forest lashed by a tempest, a ship tossed about upon a stormy sea.

Jurgis had an unpleasant sensation, a sense of confusion, of disorder, of wild and meaningless uproar. The man was tall and gaunt, as haggard as his auditor himself;

It would abash the most cynical, it would terrify the most selfish; and the voice of mockery would be silenced, and fraud and falsehood would slink back into their dens, and the truth would stand forth alone!

For I speak with the voice of the millions who are voiceless!

Of them that are oppressed and have no comforter! Of the disinherited of life, for whom there is no respite and no deliverance, to whom the world is a prison, a dungeon of torture, a tomb!

Philosophers have reasoned, prophets have denounced, poets have wept and pleaded—and still this hideous Monster roams at large!

We have schools and colleges, newspapers and books; we have searched the heavens and the earth, we have weighed and probed and reasoned⁠—and all to equip men to destroy each other!

We call it War, and pass it by—but do not put me off with platitudes and conventions—come with me, come with me—realize it! See the bodies of men pierced by bullets, blown into pieces by bursting shells!

They spend hundreds of dollars for a pair of shoes, a handkerchief, a garter; they spend millions for horses and automobiles and yachts, for palaces and banquets, for little shiny stones with which to deck their bodies.

Their life is a contest among themselves for supremacy in ostentation and recklessness, in the destroying of useful and necessary things, in the wasting of the labor and the lives of their fellow-creatures, the toil and anguish of the nations, the sweat and tears and blood of the human race!

It is all theirs—it comes to them; just as all the springs pour into streamlets, and the streamlets into rivers, and the rivers into the ocean—so, automatically and inevitably, all the wealth of society comes to them.

the clever man invents, the shrewd man directs, the wise man studies, the inspired man sings—and all the result, the products of the labor of brain and muscle, are gathered into one stupendous stream and poured into their laps!

The whole of society is in their grip, the whole labor of the world lies at their mercy⁠—and like fierce wolves they rend and destroy, like ravening vultures they devour and tear!

The whole power of mankind belongs to them, forever and beyond recall—do what it can, strive as it will, humanity lives for them and dies for them! They own not merely the labor of society, they have bought the governments;

With the voice of all your wrongs, with the voice of all your desires; with the voice of your duty and your hope—of everything in the world that is worth while to you!

The voice of the poor, demanding that poverty shall cease! The voice of the oppressed, pronouncing the doom of oppression!

The voice of power, wrought out of suffering—of resolution, crushed out of weakness—of joy and courage, born in the bottomless pit of anguish and despair! The voice of Labor, despised and outraged;

… have been crushed and beaten by them, that he should have submitted, and forgotten, and lived in peace—ah, truly that was a thing not to be put into words, a thing not to be borne by a human creature, a thing of terror and madness!

“What,” asks the prophet, “is the murder of them that kill the body, to the murder of them that kill the soul?”

And Jurgis was a man whose soul had been murdered, who had ceased to hope and to struggle—who had made terms with degradation and despair; and now, suddenly, in one awful convulsion, the black and hideous fact was made plain to him!

the whole world had been changed for him—he was free, he was free! Even if he were to suffer as he had before, even if he were to beg and starve, nothing would be the same to him; he would understand it, and bear it.

He would no longer be the sport of circumstances, he would be a man, with a will and a purpose; he would have something to fight for, something to die for, if need be!

Here were men who would show him and help him; and he would have friends and allies, he would dwell in the sight of justice, and walk arm in arm with power.

He could not think at all, he was stunned; yet he knew that in the mighty upheaval that had taken place in his soul, a new man had been born.

He had been torn out of the jaws of destruction, he had been delivered from the thraldom of despair; the whole world had been changed for him⁠—he was free, he was free!

Even if he were to suffer as he had before, even if he were to beg and starve, nothing would be the same to him; he would understand it, and bear it.

how he had come to America, and what had happened to him in the stockyards, and how his family had been broken up, and how he had become a wanderer. So much the little man heard, and then he pressed Jurgis’s arm tightly.

“You have been through the mill, comrade!” he said. “We will make a fighter out of you!”

Then Ostrinski in turn explained his circumstances. He would have asked Jurgis to his home—but he had only two rooms, and had no bed to offer. He would have given up his own bed, but his wife was ill.

He would have given up his own bed, but his wife was ill. Later on, when he understood that otherwise Jurgis would have to sleep in a hallway, he offered him his kitchen-floor, a chance which the other was only too glad to accept.

“Perhaps tomorrow we can do better,” said Ostrinski. “We try not to let a comrade starve.”

Ostrinski’s home was in the Ghetto district, where he had two rooms in the basement of a tenement. There was a baby crying as they entered, and he closed the door leading into the bedroom.

Until long after midnight Jurgis sat lost in the conversation of his new acquaintance. It was a most wonderful experience to him—an almost supernatural experience.

It was like encountering an inhabitant of the fourth dimension of space, a being who was free from all one’s own limitations.

For four years, now, Jurgis had been wandering and blundering in the depths of a wilderness;

When Jurgis had made himself familiar with the Socialist literature, as he would very quickly, he would get glimpses of the Beef Trust from all sorts of aspects, and he would find it everywhere the same; it was the incarnation of blind and insensate Greed.

It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs; it was the Great Butcher⁠—it was the spirit of Capitalism made flesh.

Upon the ocean of commerce it sailed as a pirate ship; it had hoisted the black flag and declared war upon civilization. Bribery and corruption were its everyday methods. In Chicago the city government was simply one of its branch-offices;

There were his Packingtown experiences, for instance—what was there about Packingtown that Ostrinski could not explain!

To Jurgis the packers had been equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed him that they were the Beef Trust.

They were a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land, and was preying upon the people.

and when she found he intended to look for work and to contribute his share to the family fund, she gave him full rein to convince her of anything.

A wonderfully wise little woman was Elzbieta; she could think as quickly as a hunted rabbit, and in half an hour she had chosen her life-attitude to the Socialist movement.

She agreed in everything with Jurgis, except the need of his paying his dues; and she would even go to a meeting with him now and then, and sit and plan her next day’s dinner amid the storm.

When, however, she had satisfied herself that he was sane upon all subjects except politics, she troubled herself no further about it. Jurgis was destined to find that Elzbieta’s armor was absolutely impervious to Socialism.

Her soul had been baked hard in the fire of adversity, and there was no altering it now; life to her was the hunt for daily bread, and ideas existed for her only as they bore upon that.

All that interested her in regard to this new frenzy which had seized hold of her son-in-law was whether or not it had a tendency to make him sober and industrious;

So the next morning Jurgis went to his employer and told him; and the man seized him by the hand and shook it.

“By Jove!” he cried, “that lets me out. I didn’t sleep all last night because I had discharged a good Socialist!”

So, after that, Jurgis was known to his “boss” as “Comrade Jurgis,” and in return he was expected to call him “Comrade Hinds.”

but if the glass led to another glass, and to too many glasses, he had something to spur him to remorse and resolution on the morrow.

It was so evidently a wicked thing to spend one’s pennies for drink, when the working-class was wandering in darkness, and waiting to be delivered; the price of a glass of beer would buy fifty copies of a leaflet, and one could hand these out to the unregenerate, and then get drunk upon the thought of the good that was being accomplished.

That was the way the movement had been made, and it was the only way it would progress; it availed nothing to know of it, without fighting for it—it was a thing for all, not for a few!

It would be pleasant to record that he swore off drinking immediately, and all the rest of his bad habits with it; but that would hardly be exact.

These revolutionists were not angels; they were men, and men who had come up from the social pit, and with the mire of it smeared over them.

Some of them drank, and some of them swore, and some of them ate pie with their knives;

but that would hardly be exact. These revolutionists were not angels; they were men, and men who had come up from the social pit, and with the mire of it smeared over them.

Some of them drank, and some of them swore, and some of them ate pie with their knives; there was only one difference between them and all the rest of the populace⁠—that they were men with a hope, with a cause to fight for and suffer for.

There came times to Jurgis when the vision seemed far-off and pale, and a glass of beer loomed large in comparison;

There was a man who was known in the party as the “Little Giant.”

The Lord had used up so much material in the making of his head that there had not been enough to complete his legs; but he got about on the platform, and when he shook his raven whiskers the pillars of Capitalism rocked.

He had written a veritable encyclopaedia upon the subject, a book that was nearly as big as himself.—And then there was a young author, who came from California, and had been a salmon-fisher, an oyster-pirate, a longshoreman, a sailor;

Since his life had been caught up into the current of this great stream, things which had before been the whole of life to him came to seem of relatively slight importance; his interests were elsewhere, in the world of ideas.

His outward life was commonplace and uninteresting; he was just a hotel-porter, and expected to remain one while he lived; but meantime, in the realm of thought, his life was a perpetual adventure.

There was so much to know—so many wonders to be discovered! Never in all his life did Jurgis forget the day before election, when there came a telephone message from a friend of Harry Adams, asking him to bring Jurgis to see him that night;