“Well, she came to America about a year ago. She was a store clerk, and

she hired herself to a man to be sent here to work in a factory. There

were six of them, all together, and they were brought to a house just

down the street from here, and this girl was put into a room alone, and

they gave her some dope in her food, and when she came to she found

that she had been ruined. She cried, and screamed, and tore her hair,

but she had nothing but a wrapper, and couldn’t get away, and they kept

her half insensible with drugs all the time, until she gave up. She

never got outside of that place for ten months, and then they sent her

away, because she didn’t suit. I guess they’ll put her out of here,

too—she’s getting to have crazy fits, from drinking absinthe. Only one

of the girls that came out with her got away, and she jumped out of a

second-story window one night. There was a great fuss about that—maybe

you heard of it.”

“I did,” said Jurgis, “I heard of it afterward.” (It had happened in

the place where he and Duane had taken refuge from their “country

customer.” The girl had become insane, fortunately for the police.)

“There’s lots of money in it,” said Marija—“they get as much as forty

dollars a head for girls, and they bring them from all over. There are

seventeen in this place, and nine different countries among them. In

some places you might find even more. We have half a dozen French

girls—I suppose it’s because the madame speaks the language. French

girls are bad, too, the worst of all, except for the Japanese. There’s

a place next door that’s full of Japanese women, but I wouldn’t live in

the same house with one of them.”

Marija paused for a moment or two, and then she added: “Most of the

women here are pretty decent—you’d be surprised. I used to think they

did it because they liked to; but fancy a woman selling herself to

every kind of man that comes, old or young, black or white—and doing it

because she likes to!”

“Some of them say they do,” said Jurgis.

“I know,” said she; “they say anything. They’re in, and they know they

can’t get out. But they didn’t like it when they began—you’d find

out—it’s always misery! There’s a little Jewish girl here who used to

run errands for a milliner, and got sick and lost her place; and she

was four days on the streets without a mouthful of food, and then she

went to a place just around the corner and offered herself, and they

made her give up her clothes before they would give her a bite to eat!”

Marija sat for a minute or two, brooding somberly. “Tell me about

yourself, Jurgis,” she said, suddenly. “Where have you been?”

So he told her the long story of his adventures since his flight from

home; his life as a tramp, and his work in the freight tunnels, and the

accident; and then of Jack Duane, and of his political career in the

stockyards, and his downfall and subsequent failures. Marija listened

with sympathy; it was easy to believe the tale of his late starvation,

for his face showed it all. “You found me just in the nick of time,”

she said. “I’ll stand by you—I’ll help you till you can get some work.”

“I don’t like to let you—” he began.

“Why not? Because I’m here?”

“No, not that,” he said. “But I went off and left you—”

“Nonsense!” said Marija. “Don’t think about it. I don’t blame you.”

“You must be hungry,” she said, after a minute or two. “You stay here

to lunch—I’ll have something up in the room.”

She pressed a button, and a colored woman came to the door and took her

order. “It’s nice to have somebody to wait on you,” she observed, with

a laugh, as she lay back on the bed.

As the prison breakfast had not been liberal, Jurgis had a good

appetite, and they had a little feast together, talking meanwhile of

Elzbieta and the children and old times. Shortly before they were

through, there came another colored girl, with the message that the

“madame” wanted Marija—“Lithuanian Mary,” as they called her here.

“That means you have to go,” she said to Jurgis.

So he got up, and she gave him the new address of the family, a

tenement over in the Ghetto district. “You go there,” she said.

“They’ll be glad to see you.”

But Jurgis stood hesitating.

“I—I don’t like to,” he said. “Honest, Marija, why don’t you just give

me a little money and let me look for work first?”

“How do you need money?” was her reply. “All you want is something to

eat and a place to sleep, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said; “but then I don’t like to go there after I left

them—and while I have nothing to do, and while you—you—”

“Go on!” said Marija, giving him a push. “What are you talking?—I won’t

give you money,” she added, as she followed him to the door, “because

you’ll drink it up, and do yourself harm. Here’s a quarter for you now,

and go along, and they’ll be so glad to have you back, you won’t have

time to feel ashamed. Good-by!”

So Jurgis went out, and walked down the street to think it over. He

decided that he would first try to get work, and so he put in the rest

of the day wandering here and there among factories and warehouses

without success. Then, when it was nearly dark, he concluded to go

home, and set out; but he came to a restaurant, and went in and spent

his quarter for a meal; and when he came out he changed his mind—the

night was pleasant, and he would sleep somewhere outside, and put in

the morrow hunting, and so have one more chance of a job. So he started

away again, when suddenly he chanced to look about him, and found that

he was walking down the same street and past the same hall where he had

listened to the political speech the night before. There was no red

fire and no band now, but there was a sign out, announcing a meeting,

and a stream of people pouring in through the entrance. In a flash

Jurgis had decided that he would chance it once more, and sit down and

rest while making up his mind what to do. There was no one taking

tickets, so it must be a free show again.

He entered. There were no decorations in the hall this time; but there

was quite a crowd upon the platform, and almost every seat in the place

was filled. He took one of the last, far in the rear, and straightway

forgot all about his surroundings. Would Elzbieta think that he had

come to sponge off her, or would she understand that he meant to get to

work again and do his share? Would she be decent to him, or would she

scold him? If only he could get some sort of a job before he went—if

that last boss had only been willing to try him!

—Then suddenly Jurgis looked up. A tremendous roar had burst from the

throats of the crowd, which by this time had packed the hall to the

very doors. Men and women were standing up, waving handkerchiefs,

shouting, yelling. Evidently the speaker had arrived, thought Jurgis;

what fools they were making of themselves! What were they expecting to

get out of it anyhow—what had they to do with elections, with governing

the country? Jurgis had been behind the scenes in politics.

He went back to his thoughts, but with one further fact to reckon

with—that he was caught here. The hall was now filled to the doors; and

after the meeting it would be too late for him to go home, so he would

have to make the best of it outside. Perhaps it would be better to go

home in the morning, anyway, for the children would be at school, and

he and Elzbieta could have a quiet explanation. She always had been a

reasonable person; and he really did mean to do right. He would manage

to persuade her of it—and besides, Marija was willing, and Marija was

furnishing the money. If Elzbieta were ugly, he would tell her that in

so many words.

So Jurgis went on meditating; until finally, when he had been an hour

or two in the hall, there began to prepare itself a repetition of the

dismal catastrophe of the night before. Speaking had been going on all

the time, and the audience was clapping its hands and shouting,

thrilling with excitement; and little by little the sounds were

beginning to blur in Jurgis’s ears, and his thoughts were beginning to

run together, and his head to wobble and nod. He caught himself many

times, as usual, and made desperate resolutions; but the hall was hot

and close, and his long walk and his dinner were too much for him—in

the end his head sank forward and he went off again.

And then again someone nudged him, and he sat up with his old terrified

start! He had been snoring again, of course! And now what? He fixed his

eyes ahead of him, with painful intensity, staring at the platform as

if nothing else ever had interested him, or ever could interest him,

all his life. He imagined the angry exclamations, the hostile glances;

he imagined the policeman striding toward him—reaching for his neck. Or

was he to have one more chance? Were they going to let him alone this

time? He sat trembling; waiting—

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”?

He waited long, long; and at last, when he was sure that he was no

longer watched, he stole a glance out of the corner of his eyes at the

woman who sat beside him. She was young and beautiful; she wore fine

clothes, and was what is called a “lady.” And she called him “comrade”!

He turned a little, carefully, so that he could see her better; then he

began to watch her, fascinated. She had apparently forgotten all about

him, and was looking toward the platform. A man was speaking

there—Jurgis heard his voice vaguely; but all his thoughts were for

this woman’s face. A feeling of alarm stole over him as he stared at

her. It made his flesh creep. What was the matter with her, what could

be going on, to affect any one like that? She sat as one turned to

stone, her hands clenched tightly in her lap, so tightly that he could

see the cords standing out in her wrists. There was a look of

excitement upon her face, of tense effort, as of one struggling

mightily, or witnessing a struggle. There was a faint quivering of her

nostrils; and now and then she would moisten her lips with feverish

haste. Her bosom rose and fell as she breathed, and her excitement

seemed to mount higher and higher, and then to sink away again, like a

boat tossing upon ocean surges. What was it? What was the matter? 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 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; a thin black beard covered half of his face,

and one could see only two black hollows where the eyes were. He was

speaking rapidly, in great excitement; he used many gestures—as he

spoke he moved here and there upon the stage, reaching with his long

arms as if to seize each person in his audience. His voice was deep,

like an organ; it was some time, however, before Jurgis thought of the

voice—he was too much occupied with his eyes to think of what the man

was saying. But suddenly it seemed as if the speaker had begun pointing

straight at him, as if he had singled him out particularly for his

remarks; and so Jurgis became suddenly aware of his voice, trembling,

vibrant with emotion, with pain and longing, with a burden of things

unutterable, not to be compassed by words. To hear it was to be

suddenly arrested, to be gripped, transfixed.

“You listen to these things,” the man was saying, “and you say, ‘Yes,

they are true, but they have been that way always.’ Or you say, ‘Maybe

it will come, but not in my time—it will not help me.’ And so you

return to your daily round of toil, you go back to be ground up for

profits in the world-wide mill of economic might! To toil long hours

for another’s advantage; to live in mean and squalid homes, to work in

dangerous and unhealthful places; to wrestle with the specters of

hunger and privation, to take your chances of accident, disease, and

death. And each day the struggle becomes fiercer, the pace more cruel;

each day you have to toil a little harder, and feel the iron hand of

circumstance close upon you a little tighter. Months pass, years

maybe—and then you come again; and again I am here to plead with you,

to know if want and misery have yet done their work with you, if

injustice and oppression have yet opened your eyes! I shall still be

waiting—there is nothing else that I can do. There is no wilderness

where I can hide from these things, there is no haven where I can

escape them; though I travel to the ends of the earth, I find the same

accursed system—I find that all the fair and noble impulses of

humanity, the dreams of poets and the agonies of martyrs, are shackled

and bound in the service of organized and predatory Greed! And

therefore I cannot rest, I cannot be silent; therefore I cast aside

comfort and happiness, health and good repute—and go out into the world

and cry out the pain of my spirit! Therefore I am not to be silenced by

poverty and sickness, not by hatred and obloquy, by threats and

ridicule—not by prison and persecution, if they should come—not by any

power that is upon the earth or above the earth, that was, or is, or

ever can be created. If I fail tonight, I can only try tomorrow;

knowing that the fault must be mine—that if once the vision of my soul

were spoken upon earth, if once the anguish of its defeat were uttered

in human speech, it would break the stoutest barriers of prejudice, it

would shake the most sluggish soul to action! 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! With the voice of the little child who toils tonight

in a Southern cotton mill, staggering with exhaustion, numb with agony,

and knowing no hope but the grave! Of the mother who sews by

candlelight in her tenement garret, weary and weeping, smitten with the

mortal hunger of her babes! Of the man who lies upon a bed of rags,

wrestling in his last sickness and leaving his loved ones to perish! Of

the young girl who, somewhere at this moment, is walking the streets of

this horrible city, beaten and starving, and making her choice between

the brothel and the lake! With the voice of those, whoever and wherever

they may be, who are caught beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of

Greed! With the voice of humanity, calling for deliverance! Of the

everlasting soul of Man, arising from the dust; breaking its way out of

its prison—rending the bands of oppression and ignorance—groping its

way to the light!”

The speaker paused. There was an instant of silence, while men caught

their breaths, and then like a single sound there came a cry from a

thousand people. Through it all Jurgis sat still, motionless and rigid,

his eyes fixed upon the speaker; he was trembling, smitten with wonder.

Suddenly the man raised his hands, and silence fell, and he began

again.

“I plead with you,” he said, “whoever you may be, provided that you

care about the truth; but most of all I plead with working-man, with

those to whom the evils I portray are not mere matters of sentiment, to

be dallied and toyed with, and then perhaps put aside and forgotten—to

whom they are the grim and relentless realities of the daily grind, the

chains upon their limbs, the lash upon their backs, the iron in their

souls. To you, working-men! To you, the toilers, who have made this

land, and have no voice in its councils! To you, whose lot it is to sow

that others may reap, to labor and obey, and ask no more than the wages

of a beast of burden, the food and shelter to keep you alive from day

to day. It is to you that I come with my message of salvation, it is to

you that I appeal. I know how much it is to ask of you—I know, for I

have been in your place, I have lived your life, and there is no man

before me here tonight who knows it better. I have known what it is to

be a street-waif, a bootblack, living upon a crust of bread and

sleeping in cellar stairways and under empty wagons. I have known what

it is to dare and to aspire, to dream mighty dreams and to see them

perish—to see all the fair flowers of my spirit trampled into the mire

by the wild-beast powers of my life. I know what is the price that a

working-man pays for knowledge—I have paid for it with food and sleep,

with agony of body and mind, with health, almost with life itself; and

so, when I come to you with a story of hope and freedom, with the

vision of a new earth to be created, of a new labor to be dared, I am

not surprised that I find you sordid and material, sluggish and

incredulous. That I do not despair is because I know also the forces

that are driving behind you—because I know the raging lash of poverty,

the sting of contempt and mastership, ‘the insolence of office and the

spurns.’ Because I feel sure that in the crowd that has come to me

tonight, no matter how many may be dull and heedless, no matter how

many may have come out of idle curiosity, or in order to ridicule—there

will be some one man whom pain and suffering have made desperate, whom

some chance vision of wrong and horror has startled and shocked into

attention. And to him my words will come like a sudden flash of

lightning to one who travels in darkness—revealing the way before him,

the perils and the obstacles—solving all problems, making all

difficulties clear! The scales will fall from his eyes, the shackles

will be torn from his limbs—he will leap up with a cry of thankfulness,

he will stride forth a free man at last! A man delivered from his

self-created slavery! A man who will never more be trapped—whom no

blandishments will cajole, whom no threats will frighten; who from

tonight on will move forward, and not backward, who will study and

understand, who will gird on his sword and take his place in the army

of his comrades and brothers. Who will carry the good tidings to

others, as I have carried them to him—priceless gift of liberty and

light that is neither mine nor his, but is the heritage of the soul of

man! Working-men, working-men—comrades! open your eyes and look about

you! You have lived so long in the toil and heat that your senses are

dulled, your souls are numbed; but realize once in your lives this

world in which you dwell—tear off the rags of its customs and

conventions—behold it as it is, in all its hideous nakedness! Realize

it, _realize it!_ Realize that out upon the plains of Manchuria tonight

two hostile armies are facing each other—that now, while we are seated

here, a million human beings may be hurled at each other’s throats,

striving with the fury of maniacs to tear each other to pieces! And

this in the twentieth century, nineteen hundred years since the Prince

of Peace was born on earth! Nineteen hundred years that his words have

been preached as divine, and here two armies of men are rending and

tearing each other like the wild beasts of the forest! 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! Hear the crunching of the bayonet, plunged into human

flesh; hear the groans and shrieks of agony, see the faces of men

crazed by pain, turned into fiends by fury and hate! Put your hand upon

that piece of flesh—it is hot and quivering—just now it was a part of a

man! This blood is still steaming—it was driven by a human heart!

Almighty God! and this goes on—it is systematic, organized,

premeditated! And we know it, and read of it, and take it for granted;

our papers tell of it, and the presses are not stopped—our churches

know of it, and do not close their doors—the people behold it, and do

not rise up in horror and revolution!

“Or perhaps Manchuria is too far away for you—come home with me then,

come here to Chicago. Here in this city to-night ten thousand women are

shut up in foul pens, and driven by hunger to sell their bodies to

live. And we know it, we make it a jest! And these women are made in

the image of your mothers, they may be your sisters, your daughters;

the child whom you left at home tonight, whose laughing eyes will greet

you in the morning—that fate may be waiting for her! To-night in

Chicago there are ten thousand men, homeless and wretched, willing to

work and begging for a chance, yet starving, and fronting in terror the

awful winter cold! Tonight in Chicago there are a hundred thousand

children wearing out their strength and blasting their lives in the

effort to earn their bread! There are a hundred thousand mothers who

are living in misery and squalor, struggling to earn enough to feed

their little ones! There are a hundred thousand old people, cast off

and helpless, waiting for death to take them from their torments! There

are a million people, men and women and children, who share the curse

of the wage-slave; who toil every hour they can stand and see, for just

enough to keep them alive; who are condemned till the end of their days

to monotony and weariness, to hunger and misery, to heat and cold, to

dirt and disease, to ignorance and drunkenness and vice! And then turn

over the page with me, and gaze upon the other side of the picture.

There are a thousand—ten thousand, maybe—who are the masters of these

slaves, who own their toil. They do nothing to earn what they receive,

they do not even have to ask for it—it comes to them of itself, their

only care is to dispose of it. They live in palaces, they riot in

luxury and extravagance—such as no words can describe, as makes the

imagination reel and stagger, makes the soul grow sick and faint. 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 oceans—so, automatically and inevitably, all the

wealth of society comes to them. The farmer tills the soil, the miner

digs in the earth, the weaver tends the loom, the mason carves the

stone; 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; and everywhere they use their raped and stolen power to

intrench themselves in their privileges, to dig wider and deeper the

channels through which the river of profits flows to them!—And you,

workingmen, workingmen! You have been brought up to it, you plod on

like beasts of burden, thinking only of the day and its pain—yet is

there a man among you who can believe that such a system will continue

forever—is there a man here in this audience tonight so hardened and

debased that he dare rise up before me and say that he believes it can

continue forever; that the product of the labor of society, the means

of existence of the human race, will always belong to idlers and

parasites, to be spent for the gratification of vanity and lust—to be

spent for any purpose whatever, to be at the disposal of any individual

will whatever—that somehow, somewhere, the labor of humanity will not

belong to humanity, to be used for the purposes of humanity, to be

controlled by the will of humanity? And if this is ever to be, how is

it to be—what power is there that will bring it about? Will it be the

task of your masters, do you think—will they write the charter of your

liberties? Will they forge you the sword of your deliverance, will they

marshal you the army and lead it to the fray? Will their wealth be

spent for the purpose—will they build colleges and churches to teach

you, will they print papers to herald your progress, and organize

political parties to guide and carry on the struggle? Can you not see

that the task is your task—yours to dream, yours to resolve, yours to

execute? That if ever it is carried out, it will be in the face of

every obstacle that wealth and mastership can oppose—in the face of

ridicule and slander, of hatred and persecution, of the bludgeon and

the jail? That it will be by the power of your naked bosoms, opposed to

the rage of oppression! By the grim and bitter teaching of blind and

merciless affliction! By the painful gropings of the untutored mind, by

the feeble stammerings of the uncultured voice! By the sad and lonely

hunger of the spirit; by seeking and striving and yearning, by

heartache and despairing, by agony and sweat of blood! It will be by

money paid for with hunger, by knowledge stolen from sleep, by thoughts

communicated under the shadow of the gallows! It will be a movement

beginning in the far-off past, a thing obscure and unhonored, a thing

easy to ridicule, easy to despise; a thing unlovely, wearing the aspect

of vengeance and hate—but to you, the working-man, the wage-slave,

calling with a voice insistent, imperious—with a voice that you cannot

escape, wherever upon the earth you may be! 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; a mighty giant, lying

prostrate—mountainous, colossal, but blinded, bound, and ignorant of

his strength. And now a dream of resistance haunts him, hope battling

with fear; until suddenly he stirs, and a fetter snaps—and a thrill

shoots through him, to the farthest ends of his huge body, and in a

flash the dream becomes an act! He starts, he lifts himself; and the

bands are shattered, the burdens roll off him—he rises—towering,

gigantic; he springs to his feet, he shouts in his newborn exultation—”

And the speaker’s voice broke suddenly, with the stress of his

feelings; he stood with his arms stretched out above him, and the power

of his vision seemed to lift him from the floor. The audience came to

its feet with a yell; men waved their arms, laughing aloud in their

excitement. And Jurgis was with them, he was shouting to tear his

throat; shouting because he could not help it, because the stress of

his feeling was more than he could bear. It was not merely the man’s

words, the torrent of his eloquence. It was his presence, it was his

voice: a voice with strange intonations that rang through the chambers

of the soul like the clanging of a bell—that gripped the listener like

a mighty hand about his body, that shook him and startled him with

sudden fright, with a sense of things not of earth, of mysteries never

spoken before, of presences of awe and terror! There was an unfolding

of vistas before him, a breaking of the ground beneath him, an

upheaving, a stirring, a trembling; he felt himself suddenly a mere man

no longer—there were powers within him undreamed of, there were demon

forces contending, age-long wonders struggling to be born; and he sat

oppressed with pain and joy, while a tingling stole down into his

finger tips, and his breath came hard and fast. The sentences of this

man were to Jurgis like the crashing of thunder in his soul; a flood of

emotions surged up in him—all his old hopes and longings, his old

griefs and rages and despairs. All that he had ever felt in his whole

life seemed to come back to him at once, and with one new emotion,

hardly to be described. That he should have suffered such oppressions

and such horrors was bad enough; but that he should 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! There was a falling in of all the pillars of his soul,

the sky seemed to split above him—he stood there, with his clenched

hands upraised, his eyes bloodshot, and the veins standing out purple

in his face, roaring in the voice of a wild beast, frantic, incoherent,

maniacal. And when he could shout no more he still stood there,

gasping, and whispering hoarsely to himself: “By God! By God! By God!”

CHAPTER XXIX

The man had gone back to a seat upon the platform, and Jurgis realized

that his speech was over. The applause continued for several minutes;

and then some one started a song, and the crowd took it up, and the

place shook with it. Jurgis had never heard it, and he could not make

out the words, but the wild and wonderful spirit of it seized upon

him—it was the “Marseillaise!” As stanza after stanza of it thundered

forth, he sat with his hands clasped, trembling in every nerve. He had

never been so stirred in his life—it was a miracle that had been

wrought in him. 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. 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.

The audience subsided again, and Jurgis sat back. The chairman of the

meeting came forward and began to speak. His voice sounded thin and

futile after the other’s, and to Jurgis it seemed a profanation. Why

should any one else speak, after that miraculous man—why should they

not all sit in silence? The chairman was explaining that a collection

would now be taken up to defray the expenses of the meeting, and for

the benefit of the campaign fund of the party. Jurgis heard; but he had

not a penny to give, and so his thoughts went elsewhere again.

He kept his eyes fixed on the orator, who sat in an armchair, his head

leaning on his hand and his attitude indicating exhaustion. But

suddenly he stood up again, and Jurgis heard the chairman of the

meeting saying that the speaker would now answer any questions which

the audience might care to put to him. The man came forward, and some

one—a woman—arose and asked about some opinion the speaker had

expressed concerning Tolstoy. Jurgis had never heard of Tolstoy, and

did not care anything about him. Why should any one want to ask such

questions, after an address like that? The thing was not to talk, but

to do; the thing was to get bold of others and rouse them, to organize

them and prepare for the fight! But still the discussion went on, in

ordinary conversational tones, and it brought Jurgis back to the

everyday world. A few minutes ago he had felt like seizing the hand of

the beautiful lady by his side, and kissing it; he had felt like

flinging his arms about the neck of the man on the other side of him.

And now he began to realize again that he was a “hobo,” that he was

ragged and dirty, and smelled bad, and had no place to sleep that

night!

And so, at last, when the meeting broke up, and the audience started to

leave, poor Jurgis was in an agony of uncertainty. He had not thought

of leaving—he had thought that the vision must last forever, that he

had found comrades and brothers. But now he would go out, and the thing

would fade away, and he would never be able to find it again! He sat in

his seat, frightened and wondering; but others in the same row wanted

to get out, and so he had to stand up and move along. As he was swept

down the aisle he looked from one person to another, wistfully; they

were all excitedly discussing the address—but there was nobody who

offered to discuss it with him. He was near enough to the door to feel

the night air, when desperation seized him. He knew nothing at all

about that speech he had heard, not even the name of the orator; and he

was to go away—no, no, it was preposterous, he must speak to some one;

he must find that man himself and tell him. He would not despise him,

tramp as he was!

So he stepped into an empty row of seats and watched, and when the

crowd had thinned out, he started toward the platform. The speaker was

gone; but there was a stage door that stood open, with people passing

in and out, and no one on guard. Jurgis summoned up his courage and

went in, and down a hallway, and to the door of a room where many

people were crowded. No one paid any attention to him, and he pushed

in, and in a corner he saw the man he sought. The orator sat in a

chair, with his shoulders sunk together and his eyes half closed; his

face was ghastly pale, almost greenish in hue, and one arm lay limp at

his side. A big man with spectacles on stood near him, and kept pushing

back the crowd, saying, “Stand away a little, please; can’t you see the

comrade is worn out?”

So Jurgis stood watching, while five or ten minutes passed. Now and

then the man would look up, and address a word or two to those who were

near him; and, at last, on one of these occasions, his glance rested on

Jurgis. There seemed to be a slight hint of inquiry about it, and a

sudden impulse seized the other. He stepped forward.

“I wanted to thank you, sir!” he began, in breathless haste. “I could

not go away without telling you how much—how glad I am I heard you. I—I

didn’t know anything about it all—”

The big man with the spectacles, who had moved away, came back at this

moment. “The comrade is too tired to talk to any one—” he began; but

the other held up his hand.

“Wait,” he said. “He has something to say to me.” And then he looked

into Jurgis’s face. “You want to know more about Socialism?” he asked.

Jurgis started. “I—I—” he stammered. “Is it Socialism? I didn’t know. I

want to know about what you spoke of—I want to help. I have been

through all that.”

“Where do you live?” asked the other.

“I have no home,” said Jurgis, “I am out of work.”

“You are a foreigner, are you not?”

“Lithuanian, sir.”

The man thought for a moment, and then turned to his friend. “Who is

there, Walters?” he asked. “There is Ostrinski—but he is a Pole—”

“Ostrinski speaks Lithuanian,” said the other. “All right, then; would

you mind seeing if he has gone yet?”

The other started away, and the speaker looked at Jurgis again. He had

deep, black eyes, and a face full of gentleness and pain. “You must

excuse me, comrade,” he said. “I am just tired out—I have spoken every

day for the last month. I will introduce you to some one who will be

able to help you as well as I could—”

The messenger had had to go no further than the door, he came back,

followed by a man whom he introduced to Jurgis as “Comrade Ostrinski.”

Comrade Ostrinski was a little man, scarcely up to Jurgis’s shoulder,

wizened and wrinkled, very ugly, and slightly lame. He had on a

long-tailed black coat, worn green at the seams and the buttonholes;

his eyes must have been weak, for he wore green spectacles that gave

him a grotesque appearance. But his handclasp was hearty, and he spoke

in Lithuanian, which warmed Jurgis to him.

“You want to know about Socialism?” he said. “Surely. Let us go out and

take a stroll, where we can be quiet and talk some.”

And so Jurgis bade farewell to the master wizard, and went out.

Ostrinski asked where he lived, offering to walk in that direction; and

so he had to explain once more that he was without a home. At the

other’s request he told his story; 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. 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. He had three young

children, he explained, and a baby had just come. He drew up two chairs

near the kitchen stove, adding that Jurgis must excuse the disorder of

the place, since at such a time one’s domestic arrangements were upset.

Half of the kitchen was given up to a workbench, which was piled with

clothing, and Ostrinski explained that he was a “pants finisher.” He

brought great bundles of clothing here to his home, where he and his

wife worked on them. He made a living at it, but it was getting harder

all the time, because his eyes were failing. What would come when they

gave out he could not tell; there had been no saving anything—a man

could barely keep alive by twelve or fourteen hours’ work a day. The

finishing of pants did not take much skill, and anybody could learn it,

and so the pay was forever getting less. That was the competitive wage

system; and if Jurgis wanted to understand what Socialism was, it was

there he had best begin. The workers were dependent upon a job to exist

from day to day, and so they bid against each other, and no man could

get more than the lowest man would consent to work for. And thus the

mass of the people were always in a life-and-death struggle with

poverty. That was “competition,” so far as it concerned the

wage-earner, the man who had only his labor to sell; to those on top,

the exploiters, it appeared very differently, of course—there were few

of them, and they could combine and dominate, and their power would be

unbreakable. And so all over the world two classes were forming, with

an unbridged chasm between them—the capitalist class, with its enormous

fortunes, and the proletariat, bound into slavery by unseen chains. The

latter were a thousand to one in numbers, but they were ignorant and

helpless, and they would remain at the mercy of their exploiters until

they were organized—until they had become “class-conscious.” It was a

slow and weary process, but it would go on—it was like the movement of

a glacier, once it was started it could never be stopped. Every

Socialist did his share, and lived upon the vision of the “good time

coming,”—when the working class should go to the polls and seize the

powers of government, and put an end to private property in the means

of production. No matter how poor a man was, or how much he suffered,

he could never be really unhappy while he knew of that future; even if

he did not live to see it himself, his children would, and, to a

Socialist, the victory of his class was his victory. Also he had always

the progress to encourage him; here in Chicago, for instance, the

movement was growing by leaps and bounds. Chicago was the industrial

center of the country, and nowhere else were the unions so strong; but

their organizations did the workers little good, for the employers were

organized, also; and so the strikes generally failed, and as fast as

the unions were broken up the men were coming over to the Socialists.

Ostrinski explained the organization of the party, the machinery by

which the proletariat was educating itself. There were “locals” in

every big city and town, and they were being organized rapidly in the

smaller places; a local had anywhere from six to a thousand members,

and there were fourteen hundred of them in all, with a total of about

twenty-five thousand members, who paid dues to support the

organization. “Local Cook County,” as the city organization was called,

had eighty branch locals, and it alone was spending several thousand

dollars in the campaign. It published a weekly in English, and one each

in Bohemian and German; also there was a monthly published in Chicago,

and a cooperative publishing house, that issued a million and a half of

Socialist books and pamphlets every year. All this was the growth of

the last few years—there had been almost nothing of it when Ostrinski

first came to Chicago.

Ostrinski was a Pole, about fifty years of age. He had lived in

Silesia, a member of a despised and persecuted race, and had taken part

in the proletarian movement in the early seventies, when Bismarck,

having conquered France, had turned his policy of blood and iron upon

the “International.” Ostrinski himself had twice been in jail, but he

had been young then, and had not cared. He had had more of his share of

the fight, though, for just when Socialism had broken all its barriers

and become the great political force of the empire, he had come to

America, and begun all over again. In America every one had laughed at

the mere idea of Socialism then—in America all men were free. As if

political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable! said

Ostrinski.

The little tailor sat tilted back in his stiff kitchen chair, with his

feet stretched out upon the empty stove, and speaking in low whispers,

so as not to waken those in the next room. To Jurgis he seemed a

scarcely less wonderful person than the speaker at the meeting; he was

poor, the lowest of the low, hunger-driven and miserable—and yet how

much he knew, how much he had dared and achieved, what a hero he had

been! There were others like him, too—thousands like him, and all of

them workingmen! That all this wonderful machinery of progress had been

created by his fellows—Jurgis could not believe it, it seemed too good

to be true.

That was always the way, said Ostrinski; when a man was first converted

to Socialism he was like a crazy person—he could not understand how

others could fail to see it, and he expected to convert all the world

the first week. After a while he would realize how hard a task it was;

and then it would be fortunate that other new hands kept coming, to

save him from settling down into a rut. Just now Jurgis would have

plenty of chance to vent his excitement, for a presidential campaign

was on, and everybody was talking politics. Ostrinski would take him to

the next meeting of the branch local, and introduce him, and he might

join the party. The dues were five cents a week, but any one who could

not afford this might be excused from paying. The Socialist party was a

really democratic political organization—it was controlled absolutely

by its own membership, and had no bosses. All of these things Ostrinski

explained, as also the principles of the party. You might say that

there was really but one Socialist principle—that of “no compromise,”

which was the essence of the proletarian movement all over the world.

When a Socialist was elected to office he voted with old party

legislators for any measure that was likely to be of help to the

working class, but he never forgot that these concessions, whatever

they might be, were trifles compared with the great purpose—the

organizing of the working class for the revolution. So far, the rule in

America had been that one Socialist made another Socialist once every

two years; and if they should maintain the same rate they would carry

the country in 1912—though not all of them expected to succeed as

quickly as that.

The Socialists were organized in every civilized nation; it was an

international political party, said Ostrinski, the greatest the world

had ever known. It numbered thirty million of adherents, and it cast

eight million votes. It had started its first newspaper in Japan, and

elected its first deputy in Argentina; in France it named members of

cabinets, and in Italy and Australia it held the balance of power and

turned out ministries. In Germany, where its vote was more than a third

of the total vote of the empire, all other parties and powers had

united to fight it. It would not do, Ostrinski explained, for the

proletariat of one nation to achieve the victory, for that nation would

be crushed by the military power of the others; and so the Socialist

movement was a world movement, an organization of all mankind to

establish liberty and fraternity. It was the new religion of

humanity—or you might say it was the fulfillment of the old religion,

since it implied but the literal application of all the teachings of

Christ.

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 wondering and

blundering in the depths of a wilderness; and here, suddenly, a hand

reached down and seized him, and lifted him out of it, and set him upon

a mountain-top, from which he could survey it all—could see the paths

from which he had wandered, the morasses into which he had stumbled,

the hiding places of the beasts of prey that had fallen upon him. 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. Jurgis recollected how, when he had first come to

Packingtown, he had stood and watched the hog-killing, and thought how

cruel and savage it was, and come away congratulating himself that he

was not a hog; now his new acquaintance showed him that a hog was just

what he had been—one of the packers’ hogs. What they wanted from a hog

was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what

they wanted from the workingman, and also that was what they wanted

from the public. What the hog thought of it, and what he suffered, were

not considered; and no more was it with labor, and no more with the

purchaser of meat. That was true everywhere in the world, but it was

especially true in Packingtown; there seemed to be something about the

work of slaughtering that tended to ruthlessness and ferocity—it was

literally the fact that in the methods of the packers a hundred human

lives did not balance a penny of profit. 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; it

stole billions of gallons of city water openly, it dictated to the

courts the sentences of disorderly strikers, it forbade the mayor to

enforce the building laws against it. In the national capital it had

power to prevent inspection of its product, and to falsify government

reports; it violated the rebate laws, and when an investigation was

threatened it burned its books and sent its criminal agents out of the

country. In the commercial world it was a Juggernaut car; it wiped out

thousands of businesses every year, it drove men to madness and

suicide. It had forced the price of cattle so low as to destroy the

stock-raising industry, an occupation upon which whole states existed;

it had ruined thousands of butchers who had refused to handle its

products. It divided the country into districts, and fixed the price of

meat in all of them; and it owned all the refrigerator cars, and levied

an enormous tribute upon all poultry and eggs and fruit and vegetables.

With the millions of dollars a week that poured in upon it, it was

reaching out for the control of other interests, railroads and trolley

lines, gas and electric light franchises—it already owned the leather

and the grain business of the country. The people were tremendously

stirred up over its encroachments, but nobody had any remedy to

suggest; it was the task of Socialists to teach and organize them, and

prepare them for the time when they were to seize the huge machine

called the Beef Trust, and use it to produce food for human beings and

not to heap up fortunes for a band of pirates. It was long after

midnight when Jurgis lay down upon the floor of Ostrinski’s kitchen;

and yet it was an hour before he could get to sleep, for the glory of

that joyful vision of the people of Packingtown marching in and taking

possession of the Union Stockyards!

CHAPTER XXX

Jurgis had breakfast with Ostrinski and his family, and then he went

home to Elzbieta. He was no longer shy about it—when he went in,

instead of saying all the things he had been planning to say, he

started to tell Elzbieta about the revolution! At first she thought he

was out of his mind, and it was hours before she could really feel

certain that he was himself. 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; 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.

For a week after he became a convert Jurgis continued to wander about

all day, looking for work; until at last he met with a strange fortune.

He was passing one of Chicago’s innumerable small hotels, and after

some hesitation he concluded to go in. A man he took for the proprietor

was standing in the lobby, and he went up to him and tackled him for a

job.

“What can you do?” the man asked.

“Anything, sir,” said Jurgis, and added quickly: “I’ve been out of work

for a long time, sir. I’m an honest man, and I’m strong and willing—”

The other was eying him narrowly. “Do you drink?” he asked.

“No, sir,” said Jurgis.

“Well, I’ve been employing a man as a porter, and he drinks. I’ve

discharged him seven times now, and I’ve about made up my mind that’s

enough. Would you be a porter?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s hard work. You’ll have to clean floors and wash spittoons and

fill lamps and handle trunks—”

“I’m willing, sir.”

“All right. I’ll pay you thirty a month and board, and you can begin

now, if you feel like it. You can put on the other fellow’s rig.”

And so Jurgis fell to work, and toiled like a Trojan till night. Then

he went and told Elzbieta, and also, late as it was, he paid a visit to

Ostrinski to let him know of his good fortune. Here he received a great

surprise, for when he was describing the location of the hotel

Ostrinski interrupted suddenly, “Not Hinds’s!”

“Yes,” said Jurgis, “that’s the name.”

To which the other replied, “Then you’ve got the best boss in

Chicago—he’s a state organizer of our party, and one of our best-known

speakers!”

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.” “Tommy” Hinds,

as he was known to his intimates, was a squat little man, with broad

shoulders and a florid face, decorated with gray side whiskers. He was

the kindest-hearted man that ever lived, and the

liveliest—inexhaustible in his enthusiasm, and talking Socialism all

day and all night. He was a great fellow to jolly along a crowd, and

would keep a meeting in an uproar; when once he got really waked up,

the torrent of his eloquence could be compared with nothing save

Niagara.

Tommy Hinds had begun life as a blacksmith’s helper, and had run away

to join the Union army, where he had made his first acquaintance with

“graft,” in the shape of rotten muskets and shoddy blankets. To a

musket that broke in a crisis he always attributed the death of his

only brother, and upon worthless blankets he blamed all the agonies of

his own old age. Whenever it rained, the rheumatism would get into his

joints, and then he would screw up his face and mutter: “Capitalism, my

boy, capitalism! ‘_Écrasez l’Infâme!_’” He had one unfailing remedy for

all the evils of this world, and he preached it to every one; no matter

whether the person’s trouble was failure in business, or dyspepsia, or

a quarrelsome mother-in-law, a twinkle would come into his eyes and he

would say, “You know what to do about it—vote the Socialist ticket!”

Tommy Hinds had set out upon the trail of the Octopus as soon as the

war was over. He had gone into business, and found himself in

competition with the fortunes of those who had been stealing while he

had been fighting. The city government was in their hands and the

railroads were in league with them, and honest business was driven to

the wall; and so Hinds had put all his savings into Chicago real

estate, and set out singlehanded to dam the river of graft. He had been

a reform member of the city council, he had been a Greenbacker, a Labor

Unionist, a Populist, a Bryanite—and after thirty years of fighting,

the year 1896 had served to convince him that the power of concentrated

wealth could never be controlled, but could only be destroyed. He had

published a pamphlet about it, and set out to organize a party of his

own, when a stray Socialist leaflet had revealed to him that others had

been ahead of him. Now for eight years he had been fighting for the

party, anywhere, everywhere—whether it was a G.A.R. reunion, or a

hotel-keepers’ convention, or an Afro-American business-men’s banquet,

or a Bible society picnic, Tommy Hinds would manage to get himself

invited to explain the relations of Socialism to the subject in hand.

After that he would start off upon a tour of his own, ending at some

place between New York and Oregon; and when he came back from there, he

would go out to organize new locals for the state committee; and

finally he would come home to rest—and talk Socialism in Chicago.

Hinds’s hotel was a very hot-bed of the propaganda; all the employees

were party men, and if they were not when they came, they were quite

certain to be before they went away. The proprietor would get into a

discussion with some one in the lobby, and as the conversation grew

animated, others would gather about to listen, until finally every one

in the place would be crowded into a group, and a regular debate would

be under way. This went on every night—when Tommy Hinds was not there

to do it, his clerk did it; and when his clerk was away campaigning,

the assistant attended to it, while Mrs. Hinds sat behind the desk and

did the work. The clerk was an old crony of the proprietor’s, an

awkward, rawboned giant of a man, with a lean, sallow face, a broad

mouth, and whiskers under his chin, the very type and body of a prairie

farmer. He had been that all his life—he had fought the railroads in

Kansas for fifty years, a Granger, a Farmers’ Alliance man, a

“middle-of-the-road” Populist. Finally, Tommy Hinds had revealed to him

the wonderful idea of using the trusts instead of destroying them, and

he had sold his farm and come to Chicago.

That was Amos Struver; and then there was Harry Adams, the assistant

clerk, a pale, scholarly-looking man, who came from Massachusetts, of

Pilgrim stock. Adams had been a cotton operative in Fall River, and the

continued depression in the industry had worn him and his family out,

and he had emigrated to South Carolina. In Massachusetts the percentage

of white illiteracy is eight-tenths of one per cent, while in South

Carolina it is thirteen and six-tenths per cent; also in South Carolina

there is a property qualification for voters—and for these and other

reasons child labor is the rule, and so the cotton mills were driving

those of Massachusetts out of the business. Adams did not know this, he

only knew that the Southern mills were running; but when he got there

he found that if he was to live, all his family would have to work, and

from six o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. So he had set

to work to organize the mill hands, after the fashion in Massachusetts,

and had been discharged; but he had gotten other work, and stuck at it,

and at last there had been a strike for shorter hours, and Harry Adams

had attempted to address a street meeting, which was the end of him. In

the states of the far South the labor of convicts is leased to

contractors, and when there are not convicts enough they have to be

supplied. Harry Adams was sent up by a judge who was a cousin of the

mill owner with whose business he had interfered; and though the life

had nearly killed him, he had been wise enough not to murmur, and at

the end of his term he and his family had left the state of South

Carolina—hell’s back yard, as he called it. He had no money for

carfare, but it was harvest-time, and they walked one day and worked

the next; and so Adams got at last to Chicago, and joined the Socialist

party. He was a studious man, reserved, and nothing of an orator; but

he always had a pile of books under his desk in the hotel, and articles

from his pen were beginning to attract attention in the party press.

Contrary to what one would have expected, all this radicalism did not

hurt the hotel business; the radicals flocked to it, and the commercial

travelers all found it diverting. Of late, also, the hotel had become a

favorite stopping place for Western cattlemen. Now that the Beef Trust

had adopted the trick of raising prices to induce enormous shipments of

cattle, and then dropping them again and scooping in all they needed, a

stock raiser was very apt to find himself in Chicago without money

enough to pay his freight bill; and so he had to go to a cheap hotel,

and it was no drawback to him if there was an agitator talking in the

lobby. These Western fellows were just “meat” for Tommy Hinds—he would

get a dozen of them around him and paint little pictures of “the

System.” Of course, it was not a week before he had heard Jurgis’s

story, and after that he would not have let his new porter go for the

world. “See here,” he would say, in the middle of an argument, “I’ve

got a fellow right here in my place who’s worked there and seen every

bit of it!” And then Jurgis would drop his work, whatever it was, and

come, and the other would say, “Comrade Jurgis, just tell these

gentlemen what you saw on the killing-beds.” At first this request

caused poor Jurgis the most acute agony, and it was like pulling teeth

to get him to talk; but gradually he found out what was wanted, and in

the end he learned to stand up and speak his piece with enthusiasm. His

employer would sit by and encourage him with exclamations and shakes of

the head; when Jurgis would give the formula for “potted ham,” or tell

about the condemned hogs that were dropped into the “destructors” at

the top and immediately taken out again at the bottom, to be shipped

into another state and made into lard, Tommy Hinds would bang his knee

and cry, “Do you think a man could make up a thing like that out of his

head?”

And then the hotel-keeper would go on to show how the Socialists had

the only real remedy for such evils, how they alone “meant business”

with the Beef Trust. And when, in answer to this, the victim would say

that the whole country was getting stirred up, that the newspapers were

full of denunciations of it, and the government taking action against

it, Tommy Hinds had a knock-out blow all ready. “Yes,” he would say,

“all that is true—but what do you suppose is the reason for it? Are you

foolish enough to believe that it’s done for the public? There are

other trusts in the country just as illegal and extortionate as the

Beef Trust: there is the Coal Trust, that freezes the poor in

winter—there is the Steel Trust, that doubles the price of every nail

in your shoes—there is the Oil Trust, that keeps you from reading at

night—and why do you suppose it is that all the fury of the press and

the government is directed against the Beef Trust?” And when to this

the victim would reply that there was clamor enough over the Oil Trust,

the other would continue: “Ten years ago Henry D. Lloyd told all the

truth about the Standard Oil Company in his Wealth versus Commonwealth;

and the book was allowed to die, and you hardly ever hear of it. And

now, at last, two magazines have the courage to tackle ‘Standard Oil’

again, and what happens? The newspapers ridicule the authors, the

churches defend the criminals, and the government—does nothing. And

now, why is it all so different with the Beef Trust?”

Here the other would generally admit that he was “stuck”; and Tommy

Hinds would explain to him, and it was fun to see his eyes open. “If

you were a Socialist,” the hotel-keeper would say, “you would

understand that the power which really governs the United States today

is the Railroad Trust. It is the Railroad Trust that runs your state

government, wherever you live, and that runs the United States Senate.

And all of the trusts that I have named are railroad trusts—save only

the Beef Trust! The Beef Trust has defied the railroads—it is

plundering them day by day through the Private Car; and so the public

is roused to fury, and the papers clamor for action, and the government

goes on the war-path! And you poor common people watch and applaud the

job, and think it’s all done for you, and never dream that it is really

the grand climax of the century-long battle of commercial

competition—the final death grapple between the chiefs of the Beef

Trust and ‘Standard Oil,’ for the prize of the mastery and ownership of

the United States of America!”

Such was the new home in which Jurgis lived and worked, and in which

his education was completed. Perhaps you would imagine that he did not

do much work there, but that would be a great mistake. He would have

cut off one hand for Tommy Hinds; and to keep Hinds’s hotel a thing of

beauty was his joy in life. That he had a score of Socialist arguments

chasing through his brain in the meantime did not interfere with this;

on the contrary, Jurgis scrubbed the spittoons and polished the

banisters all the more vehemently because at the same time he was

wrestling inwardly with an imaginary recalcitrant. 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; 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; 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! A corollary of this proposition of course

was, that any one who refused to receive the new gospel was personally

responsible for keeping Jurgis from his heart’s desire; and this, alas,

made him uncomfortable as an acquaintance. He met some neighbors with

whom Elzbieta had made friends in her neighborhood, and he set out to

make Socialists of them by wholesale, and several times he all but got

into a fight.

It was all so painfully obvious to Jurgis! It was so incomprehensible

how a man could fail to see it! Here were all the opportunities of the

country, the land, and the buildings upon the land, the railroads, the

mines, the factories, and the stores, all in the hands of a few private

individuals, called capitalists, for whom the people were obliged to

work for wages. The whole balance of what the people produced went to

heap up the fortunes of these capitalists, to heap, and heap again, and

yet again—and that in spite of the fact that they, and every one about

them, lived in unthinkable luxury! And was it not plain that if the

people cut off the share of those who merely “owned,” the share of

those who worked would be much greater? That was as plain as two and

two makes four; and it was the whole of it, absolutely the whole of it;

and yet there were people who could not see it, who would argue about

everything else in the world. They would tell you that governments

could not manage things as economically as private individuals; they

would repeat and repeat that, and think they were saying something!

They could not see that “economical” management by masters meant simply

that they, the people, were worked harder and ground closer and paid

less! They were wage-earners and servants, at the mercy of exploiters

whose one thought was to get as much out of them as possible; and they

were taking an interest in the process, were anxious lest it should not

be done thoroughly enough! Was it not honestly a trial to listen to an

argument such as that?

And yet there were things even worse. You would begin talking to some

poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty years, and

had never been able to save a penny; who left home every morning at six

o’clock, to go and tend a machine, and come back at night too tired to

take his clothes off; who had never had a week’s vacation in his life,

had never traveled, never had an adventure, never learned anything,

never hoped anything—and when you started to tell him about Socialism

he would sniff and say, “I’m not interested in that—I’m an

individualist!” And then he would go on to tell you that Socialism was

“paternalism,” and that if it ever had its way the world would stop

progressing. It was enough to make a mule laugh, to hear arguments like

that; and yet it was no laughing matter, as you found out—for how many

millions of such poor deluded wretches there were, whose lives had been

so stunted by capitalism that they no longer knew what freedom was! And

they really thought that it was “individualism” for tens of thousands

of them to herd together and obey the orders of a steel magnate, and

produce hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth for him, and then let

him give them libraries; while for them to take the industry, and run

it to suit themselves, and build their own libraries—that would have

been “Paternalism”!

Sometimes the agony of such things as this was almost more than Jurgis

could bear; yet there was no way of escape from it, there was nothing

to do but to dig away at the base of this mountain of ignorance and

prejudice. You must keep at the poor fellow; you must hold your temper,

and argue with him, and watch for your chance to stick an idea or two

into his head. And the rest of the time you must sharpen up your

weapons—you must think out new replies to his objections, and provide

yourself with new facts to prove to him the folly of his ways.

So Jurgis acquired the reading habit. He would carry in his pocket a

tract or a pamphlet which some one had loaned him, and whenever he had

an idle moment during the day he would plod through a paragraph, and

then think about it while he worked. Also he read the newspapers, and

asked questions about them. One of the other porters at Hinds’s was a

sharp little Irishman, who knew everything that Jurgis wanted to know;

and while they were busy he would explain to him the geography of

America, and its history, its constitution and its laws; also he gave

him an idea of the business system of the country, the great railroads

and corporations, and who owned them, and the labor unions, and the big

strikes, and the men who had led them. Then at night, when he could get

off, Jurgis would attend the Socialist meetings. During the campaign

one was not dependent upon the street corner affairs, where the weather

and the quality of the orator were equally uncertain; there were hall

meetings every night, and one could hear speakers of national

prominence. These discussed the political situation from every point of

view, and all that troubled Jurgis was the impossibility of carrying

off but a small part of the treasures they offered him.

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 encyclopedia 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; who had tramped the country

and been sent to jail, had lived in the Whitechapel slums, and been to

the Klondike in search of gold. All these things he pictured in his

books, and because he was a man of genius he forced the world to hear

him. Now he was famous, but wherever he went he still preached the

gospel of the poor. And then there was one who was known at the

“millionaire Socialist.” He had made a fortune in business, and spent

nearly all of it in building up a magazine, which the post office

department had tried to suppress, and had driven to Canada. He was a

quiet-mannered man, whom you would have taken for anything in the world

but a Socialist agitator. His speech was simple and informal—he could

not understand why any one should get excited about these things. It

was a process of economic evolution, he said, and he exhibited its laws

and methods. Life was a struggle for existence, and the strong overcame

the weak, and in turn were overcome by the strongest. Those who lost in

the struggle were generally exterminated; but now and then they had

been known to save themselves by combination—which was a new and higher

kind of strength. It was so that the gregarious animals had overcome

the predaceous; it was so, in human history, that the people had

mastered the kings. The workers were simply the citizens of industry,

and the Socialist movement was the expression of their will to survive.

The inevitability of the revolution depended upon this fact, that they

had no choice but to unite or be exterminated; this fact, grim and

inexorable, depended upon no human will, it was the law of the economic

process, of which the editor showed the details with the most marvelous

precision.

And later on came the evening of the great meeting of the campaign,

when Jurgis heard the two standard-bearers of his party. Ten years

before there had been in Chicago a strike of a hundred and fifty

thousand railroad employees, and thugs had been hired by the railroads

to commit violence, and the President of the United States had sent in

troops to break the strike, by flinging the officers of the union into

jail without trial. The president of the union came out of his cell a

ruined man; but also he came out a Socialist; and now for just ten

years he had been traveling up and down the country, standing face to

face with the people, and pleading with them for justice. He was a man

of electric presence, tall and gaunt, with a face worn thin by struggle

and suffering. The fury of outraged manhood gleamed in it—and the tears

of suffering little children pleaded in his voice. When he spoke he

paced the stage, lithe and eager, like a panther. He leaned over,

reaching out for his audience; he pointed into their souls with an

insistent finger. His voice was husky from much speaking, but the great

auditorium was as still as death, and every one heard him.

And then, as Jurgis came out from this meeting, some one handed him a

paper which he carried home with him and read; and so he became

acquainted with the “Appeal to Reason.” About twelve years previously a

Colorado real-estate speculator had made up his mind that it was wrong

to gamble in the necessities of life of human beings: and so he had

retired and begun the publication of a Socialist weekly. There had come

a time when he had to set his own type, but he had held on and won out,

and now his publication was an institution. It used a carload of paper

every week, and the mail trains would be hours loading up at the depot

of the little Kansas town. It was a four-page weekly, which sold for

less than half a cent a copy; its regular subscription list was a

quarter of a million, and it went to every crossroads post office in

America.

The “Appeal” was a “propaganda” paper. It had a manner all its own—it

was full of ginger and spice, of Western slang and hustle: It collected

news of the doings of the “plutes,” and served it up for the benefit of

the “American working-mule.” It would have columns of the deadly

parallel—the million dollars’ worth of diamonds, or the fancy

pet-poodle establishment of a society dame, beside the fate of Mrs.

Murphy of San Francisco, who had starved to death on the streets, or of

John Robinson, just out of the hospital, who had hanged himself in New

York because he could not find work. It collected the stories of graft

and misery from the daily press, and made a little pungent paragraphs

out of them. “Three banks of Bungtown, South Dakota, failed, and more

savings of the workers swallowed up!” “The mayor of Sandy Creek,

Oklahoma, has skipped with a hundred thousand dollars. That’s the kind

of rulers the old partyites give you!” “The president of the Florida

Flying Machine Company is in jail for bigamy. He was a prominent

opponent of Socialism, which he said would break up the home!” The

“Appeal” had what it called its “Army,” about thirty thousand of the

faithful, who did things for it; and it was always exhorting the “Army”

to keep its dander up, and occasionally encouraging it with a prize

competition, for anything from a gold watch to a private yacht or an

eighty-acre farm. Its office helpers were all known to the “Army” by

quaint titles—“Inky Ike,” “the Bald-headed Man,” “the Redheaded Girl,”

“the Bulldog,” “the Office Goat,” and “the One Hoss.”

But sometimes, again, the “Appeal” would be desperately serious. It

sent a correspondent to Colorado, and printed pages describing the

overthrow of American institutions in that state. In a certain city of

the country it had over forty of its “Army” in the headquarters of the

Telegraph Trust, and no message of importance to Socialists ever went

through that a copy of it did not go to the “Appeal.” It would print

great broadsides during the campaign; one copy that came to Jurgis was

a manifesto addressed to striking workingmen, of which nearly a million

copies had been distributed in the industrial centers, wherever the

employers’ associations had been carrying out their “open shop”

program. “You have lost the strike!” it was headed. “And now what are

you going to do about it?” It was what is called an “incendiary”

appeal—it was written by a man into whose soul the iron had entered.

When this edition appeared, twenty thousand copies were sent to the

stockyards district; and they were taken out and stowed away in the

rear of a little cigar store, and every evening, and on Sundays, the

members of the Packingtown locals would get armfuls and distribute them

on the streets and in the houses. The people of Packingtown had lost

their strike, if ever a people had, and so they read these papers

gladly, and twenty thousand were hardly enough to go round. Jurgis had

resolved not to go near his old home again, but when he heard of this

it was too much for him, and every night for a week he would get on the

car and ride out to the stockyards, and help to undo his work of the

previous year, when he had sent Mike Scully’s ten-pin setter to the

city Board of Aldermen.

It was quite marvelous to see what a difference twelve months had made

in Packingtown—the eyes of the people were getting opened! The

Socialists were literally sweeping everything before them that

election, and Scully and the Cook County machine were at their wits’

end for an “issue.” At the very close of the campaign they bethought

themselves of the fact that the strike had been broken by Negroes, and

so they sent for a South Carolina fire-eater, the “pitchfork senator,”

as he was called, a man who took off his coat when he talked to

workingmen, and damned and swore like a Hessian. This meeting they

advertised extensively, and the Socialists advertised it too—with the

result that about a thousand of them were on hand that evening. The

“pitchfork senator” stood their fusillade of questions for about an

hour, and then went home in disgust, and the balance of the meeting was

a strictly party affair. Jurgis, who had insisted upon coming, had the

time of his life that night; he danced about and waved his arms in his

excitement—and at the very climax he broke loose from his friends, and

got out into the aisle, and proceeded to make a speech himself! The

senator had been denying that the Democratic party was corrupt; it was

always the Republicans who bought the votes, he said—and here was

Jurgis shouting furiously, “It’s a lie! It’s a lie!” After which he

went on to tell them how he knew it—that he knew it because he had

bought them himself! And he would have told the “pitchfork senator” all

his experiences, had not Harry Adams and a friend grabbed him about the

neck and shoved him into a seat.

CHAPTER XXXI

One of the first things that Jurgis had done after he got a job was to

go and see Marija. She came down into the basement of the house to meet

him, and he stood by the door with his hat in his hand, saying, “I’ve

got work now, and so you can leave here.”

But Marija only shook her head. There was nothing else for her to do,

she said, and nobody to employ her. She could not keep her past a

secret—girls had tried it, and they were always found out. There were

thousands of men who came to this place, and sooner or later she would

meet one of them. “And besides,” Marija added, “I can’t do anything.

I’m no good—I take dope. What could you do with me?”

“Can’t you stop?” Jurgis cried.

“No,” she answered, “I’ll never stop. What’s the use of talking about

it—I’ll stay here till I die, I guess. It’s all I’m fit for.” And that

was all that he could get her to say—there was no use trying. When he

told her he would not let Elzbieta take her money, she answered

indifferently: “Then it’ll be wasted here—that’s all.” Her eyelids

looked heavy and her face was red and swollen; he saw that he was

annoying her, that she only wanted him to go away. So he went,

disappointed and sad.

Poor Jurgis was not very happy in his home-life. Elzbieta was sick a

good deal now, and the boys were wild and unruly, and very much the

worse for their life upon the streets. But he stuck by the family

nevertheless, for they reminded him of his old happiness; and when

things went wrong he could solace himself with a plunge into the

Socialist movement. 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; and Jurgis

went, and met one of the minds of the movement.

The invitation was from a man named Fisher, a Chicago millionaire who

had given up his life to settlement work, and had a little home in the

heart of the city’s slums. He did not belong to the party, but he was

in sympathy with it; and he said that he was to have as his guest that

night the editor of a big Eastern magazine, who wrote against

Socialism, but really did not know what it was. The millionaire

suggested that Adams bring Jurgis along, and then start up the subject

of “pure food,” in which the editor was interested.

Young Fisher’s home was a little two-story brick house, dingy and

weather-beaten outside, but attractive within. The room that Jurgis saw

was half lined with books, and upon the walls were many pictures, dimly

visible in the soft, yellow light; it was a cold, rainy night, so a log

fire was crackling in the open hearth. Seven or eight people were

gathered about it when Adams and his friend arrived, and Jurgis saw to

his dismay that three of them were ladies. He had never talked to

people of this sort before, and he fell into an agony of embarrassment.

He stood in the doorway clutching his hat tightly in his hands, and

made a deep bow to each of the persons as he was introduced; then, when

he was asked to have a seat, he took a chair in a dark corner, and sat

down upon the edge of it, and wiped the perspiration off his forehead

with his sleeve. He was terrified lest they should expect him to talk.

There was the host himself, a tall, athletic young man, clad in evening

dress, as also was the editor, a dyspeptic-looking gentleman named

Maynard. There was the former’s frail young wife, and also an elderly

lady, who taught kindergarten in the settlement, and a young college

student, a beautiful girl with an intense and earnest face. She only

spoke once or twice while Jurgis was there—the rest of the time she sat

by the table in the center of the room, resting her chin in her hands

and drinking in the conversation. There were two other men, whom young

Fisher had introduced to Jurgis as Mr. Lucas and Mr. Schliemann; he

heard them address Adams as “Comrade,” and so he knew that they were

Socialists.

The one called Lucas was a mild and meek-looking little gentleman of

clerical aspect; he had been an itinerant evangelist, it transpired,

and had seen the light and become a prophet of the new dispensation. He

traveled all over the country, living like the apostles of old, upon

hospitality, and preaching upon street-corners when there was no hall.

The other man had been in the midst of a discussion with the editor

when Adams and Jurgis came in; and at the suggestion of the host they

resumed it after the interruption. Jurgis was soon sitting spellbound,

thinking that here was surely the strangest man that had ever lived in

the world.

Nicholas Schliemann was a Swede, a tall, gaunt person, with hairy hands

and bristling yellow beard; he was a university man, and had been a

professor of philosophy—until, as he said, he had found that he was

selling his character as well as his time. Instead he had come to

America, where he lived in a garret room in this slum district, and

made volcanic energy take the place of fire. He studied the composition

of food-stuffs, and knew exactly how many proteids and carbohydrates

his body needed; and by scientific chewing he said that he tripled the

value of all he ate, so that it cost him eleven cents a day. About the

first of July he would leave Chicago for his vacation, on foot; and

when he struck the harvest fields he would set to work for two dollars

and a half a day, and come home when he had another year’s supply—a

hundred and twenty-five dollars. That was the nearest approach to

independence a man could make “under capitalism,” he explained; he

would never marry, for no sane man would allow himself to fall in love

until after the revolution.

He sat in a big arm-chair, with his legs crossed, and his head so far

in the shadow that one saw only two glowing lights, reflected from the

fire on the hearth. He spoke simply, and utterly without emotion; with

the manner of a teacher setting forth to a group of scholars an axiom

in geometry, he would enunciate such propositions as made the hair of

an ordinary person rise on end. And when the auditor had asserted his

non-comprehension, he would proceed to elucidate by some new

proposition, yet more appalling. To Jurgis the Herr Dr. Schliemann

assumed the proportions of a thunderstorm or an earthquake. And yet,

strange as it might seem, there was a subtle bond between them, and he

could follow the argument nearly all the time. He was carried over the

difficult places in spite of himself; and he went plunging away in mad

career—a very Mazeppa-ride upon the wild horse Speculation.

Nicholas Schliemann was familiar with all the universe, and with man as

a small part of it. He understood human institutions, and blew them

about like soap bubbles. It was surprising that so much destructiveness

could be contained in one human mind. Was it government? The purpose of

government was the guarding of property-rights, the perpetuation of

ancient force and modern fraud. Or was it marriage? Marriage and

prostitution were two sides of one shield, the predatory man’s

exploitation of the sex-pleasure. The difference between them was a

difference of class. If a woman had money she might dictate her own

terms: equality, a life contract, and the legitimacy—that is, the

property-rights—of her children. If she had no money, she was a

proletarian, and sold herself for an existence. And then the subject

became Religion, which was the Archfiend’s deadliest weapon. Government

oppressed the body of the wage-slave, but Religion oppressed his mind,

and poisoned the stream of progress at its source. The working-man was

to fix his hopes upon a future life, while his pockets were picked in

this one; he was brought up to frugality, humility, obedience—in short

to all the pseudo-virtues of capitalism. The destiny of civilization

would be decided in one final death struggle between the Red

International and the Black, between Socialism and the Roman Catholic

Church; while here at home, “the stygian midnight of American

evangelicalism—”

And here the ex-preacher entered the field, and there was a lively

tussle. “Comrade” Lucas was not what is called an educated man; he knew

only the Bible, but it was the Bible interpreted by real experience.

And what was the use, he asked, of confusing Religion with men’s

perversions of it? That the church was in the hands of the merchants at

the moment was obvious enough; but already there were signs of

rebellion, and if Comrade Schliemann could come back a few years from

now—

“Ah, yes,” said the other, “of course, I have no doubt that in a

hundred years the Vatican will be denying that it ever opposed

Socialism, just as at present it denies that it ever tortured Galileo.”

“I am not defending the Vatican,” exclaimed Lucas, vehemently. “I am

defending the word of God—which is one long cry of the human spirit for

deliverance from the sway of oppression. Take the twenty-fourth chapter

of the Book of Job, which I am accustomed to quote in my addresses as

‘the Bible upon the Beef Trust’; or take the words of Isaiah—or of the

Master himself! Not the elegant prince of our debauched and vicious

art, not the jeweled idol of our society churches—but the Jesus of the

awful reality, the man of sorrow and pain, the outcast, despised of the

world, who had nowhere to lay his head—”

“I will grant you Jesus,” interrupted the other.

“Well, then,” cried Lucas, “and why should Jesus have nothing to do

with his church—why should his words and his life be of no authority

among those who profess to adore him? Here is a man who was the world’s

first revolutionist, the true founder of the Socialist movement; a man

whose whole being was one flame of hatred for wealth, and all that

wealth stands for,—for the pride of wealth, and the luxury of wealth,

and the tyranny of wealth; who was himself a beggar and a tramp, a man

of the people, an associate of saloon-keepers and women of the town;

who again and again, in the most explicit language, denounced wealth

and the holding of wealth: ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures on

earth!’—‘Sell that ye have and give alms!’—‘Blessed are ye poor, for

yours is the kingdom of Heaven!’—‘Woe unto you that are rich, for ye

have received your consolation!’—‘Verily, I say unto you, that a rich

man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of Heaven!’ Who denounced in

unmeasured terms the exploiters of his own time: ‘Woe unto you, scribes

and pharisees, hypocrites!’—‘Woe unto you also, you lawyers!’—‘Ye

serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of

hell?’ Who drove out the business men and brokers from the temple with

a whip! Who was crucified—think of it—for an incendiary and a disturber

of the social order! And this man they have made into the high priest

of property and smug respectability, a divine sanction of all the

horrors and abominations of modern commercial civilization! Jeweled

images are made of him, sensual priests burn incense to him, and modern

pirates of industry bring their dollars, wrung from the toil of

helpless women and children, and build temples to him, and sit in

cushioned seats and listen to his teachings expounded by doctors of

dusty divinity—”

“Bravo!” cried Schliemann, laughing. But the other was in full

career—he had talked this subject every day for five years, and had

never yet let himself be stopped. “This Jesus of Nazareth!” he cried.

“This class-conscious working-man! This union carpenter! This agitator,

law-breaker, firebrand, anarchist! He, the sovereign lord and master of

a world which grinds the bodies and souls of human beings into

dollars—if he could come into the world this day and see the things

that men have made in his name, would it not blast his soul with

horror? Would he not go mad at the sight of it, he the Prince of Mercy

and Love! That dreadful night when he lay in the Garden of Gethsemane

and writhed in agony until he sweat blood—do you think that he saw

anything worse than he might see tonight upon the plains of Manchuria,

where men march out with a jeweled image of him before them, to do

wholesale murder for the benefit of foul monsters of sensuality and

cruelty? Do you not know that if he were in St. Petersburg now, he

would take the whip with which he drove out the bankers from his

temple—”

Here the speaker paused an instant for breath. “No, comrade,” said the

other, dryly, “for he was a practical man. He would take pretty little

imitation lemons, such as are now being shipped into Russia, handy for

carrying in the pockets, and strong enough to blow a whole temple out

of sight.”

Lucas waited until the company had stopped laughing over this; then he

began again: “But look at it from the point of view of practical

politics, comrade. Here is an historical figure whom all men reverence

and love, whom some regard as divine; and who was one of us—who lived

our life, and taught our doctrine. And now shall we leave him in the

hands of his enemies—shall we allow them to stifle and stultify his

example? We have his words, which no one can deny; and shall we not

quote them to the people, and prove to them what he was, and what he

taught, and what he did? No, no, a thousand times no!—we shall use his

authority to turn out the knaves and sluggards from his ministry, and

we shall yet rouse the people to action!—”

Lucas halted again; and the other stretched out his hand to a paper on

the table. “Here, comrade,” he said, with a laugh, “here is a place for

you to begin. A bishop whose wife has just been robbed of fifty

thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds! And a most unctuous and oily of

bishops! An eminent and scholarly bishop! A philanthropist and friend

of labor bishop—a Civic Federation decoy duck for the chloroforming of

the wage-working-man!”

To this little passage of arms the rest of the company sat as

spectators. But now Mr. Maynard, the editor, took occasion to remark,

somewhat naïvely, that he had always understood that Socialists had a

cut-and-dried program for the future of civilization; whereas here were

two active members of the party, who, from what he could make out, were

agreed about nothing at all. Would the two, for his enlightenment, try

to ascertain just what they had in common, and why they belonged to the

same party? This resulted, after much debating, in the formulating of

two carefully worded propositions: First, that a Socialist believes in

the common ownership and democratic management of the means of

producing the necessities of life; and, second, that a Socialist

believes that the means by which this is to be brought about is the

class conscious political organization of the wage-earners. Thus far

they were at one; but no farther. To Lucas, the religious zealot, the

co-operative commonwealth was the New Jerusalem, the kingdom of Heaven,

which is “within you.” To the other, Socialism was simply a necessary

step toward a far-distant goal, a step to be tolerated with impatience.

Schliemann called himself a “philosophic anarchist”; and he explained

that an anarchist was one who believed that the end of human existence

was the free development of every personality, unrestricted by laws

save those of its own being. Since the same kind of match would light

every one’s fire and the same-shaped loaf of bread would fill every

one’s stomach, it would be perfectly feasible to submit industry to the

control of a majority vote. There was only one earth, and the quantity

of material things was limited. Of intellectual and moral things, on

the other hand, there was no limit, and one could have more without

another’s having less; hence “Communism in material production,

anarchism in intellectual,” was the formula of modern proletarian

thought. As soon as the birth agony was over, and the wounds of society

had been healed, there would be established a simple system whereby

each man was credited with his labor and debited with his purchases;

and after that the processes of production, exchange, and consumption

would go on automatically, and without our being conscious of them, any

more than a man is conscious of the beating of his heart. And then,

explained Schliemann, society would break up into independent,

self-governing communities of mutually congenial persons; examples of

which at present were clubs, churches, and political parties. After the

revolution, all the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual activities of

men would be cared for by such “free associations”; romantic novelists

would be supported by those who liked to read romantic novels, and

impressionist painters would be supported by those who liked to look at

impressionist pictures—and the same with preachers and scientists,

editors and actors and musicians. If any one wanted to work or paint or

pray, and could find no one to maintain him, he could support himself

by working part of the time. That was the case at present, the only

difference being that the competitive wage system compelled a man to

work all the time to live, while, after the abolition of privilege and

exploitation, any one would be able to support himself by an hour’s

work a day. Also the artist’s audience of the present was a small

minority of people, all debased and vulgarized by the effort it had

cost them to win in the commercial battle, of the intellectual and

artistic activities which would result when the whole of mankind was

set free from the nightmare of competition, we could at present form no

conception whatever.

And then the editor wanted to know upon what ground Dr. Schliemann

asserted that it might be possible for a society to exist upon an

hour’s toil by each of its members. “Just what,” answered the other,

“would be the productive capacity of society if the present resources

of science were utilized, we have no means of ascertaining; but we may

be sure it would exceed anything that would sound reasonable to minds

inured to the ferocious barbarities of capitalism. After the triumph of

the international proletariat, war would of course be inconceivable;

and who can figure the cost of war to humanity—not merely the value of

the lives and the material that it destroys, not merely the cost of

keeping millions of men in idleness, of arming and equipping them for

battle and parade, but the drain upon the vital energies of society by

the war attitude and the war terror, the brutality and ignorance, the

drunkenness, prostitution, and crime it entails, the industrial

impotence and the moral deadness? Do you think that it would be too

much to say that two hours of the working time of every efficient

member of a community goes to feed the red fiend of war?”

And then Schliemann went on to outline some of the wastes of

competition: the losses of industrial warfare; the ceaseless worry and

friction; the vices—such as drink, for instance, the use of which had

nearly doubled in twenty years, as a consequence of the intensification

of the economic struggle; the idle and unproductive members of the

community, the frivolous rich and the pauperized poor; the law and the

whole machinery of repression; the wastes of social ostentation, the

milliners and tailors, the hairdressers, dancing masters, chefs and

lackeys. “You understand,” he said, “that in a society dominated by the

fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of

prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power. So we have, at

the present moment, a society with, say, thirty per cent of the

population occupied in producing useless articles, and one per cent

occupied in destroying them. And this is not all; for the servants and

panders of the parasites are also parasites, the milliners and the

jewelers and the lackeys have also to be supported by the useful

members of the community. And bear in mind also that this monstrous

disease affects not merely the idlers and their menials, its poison

penetrates the whole social body. Beneath the hundred thousand women of

the elite are a million middle-class women, miserable because they are

not of the elite, and trying to appear of it in public; and beneath

them, in turn, are five million farmers’ wives reading ‘fashion papers’

and trimming bonnets, and shop-girls and serving-maids selling

themselves into brothels for cheap jewelry and imitation seal-skin

robes. And then consider that, added to this competition in display,

you have, like oil on the flames, a whole system of competition in

selling! You have manufacturers contriving tens of thousands of

catchpenny devices, storekeepers displaying them, and newspapers and

magazines filled up with advertisements of them!”

“And don’t forget the wastes of fraud,” put in young Fisher.

“When one comes to the ultra-modern profession of advertising,”

responded Schliemann—“the science of persuading people to buy what they

do not want—he is in the very center of the ghastly charnel house of

capitalist destructiveness, and he scarcely knows which of a dozen

horrors to point out first. But consider the waste in time and energy

incidental to making ten thousand varieties of a thing for purposes of

ostentation and snobbishness, where one variety would do for use!

Consider all the waste incidental to the manufacture of cheap qualities

of goods, of goods made to sell and deceive the ignorant; consider the

wastes of adulteration,—the shoddy clothing, the cotton blankets, the

unstable tenements, the ground-cork life-preservers, the adulterated

milk, the aniline soda water, the potato-flour sausages—”

“And consider the moral aspects of the thing,” put in the ex-preacher.

“Precisely,” said Schliemann; “the low knavery and the ferocious

cruelty incidental to them, the plotting and the lying and the bribing,

the blustering and bragging, the screaming egotism, the hurrying and

worrying. Of course, imitation and adulteration are the essence of

competition—they are but another form of the phrase ‘to buy in the

cheapest market and sell in the dearest.’ A government official has

stated that the nation suffers a loss of a billion and a quarter

dollars a year through adulterated foods; which means, of course, not

only materials wasted that might have been useful outside of the human

stomach, but doctors and nurses for people who would otherwise have

been well, and undertakers for the whole human race ten or twenty years

before the proper time. Then again, consider the waste of time and

energy required to sell these things in a dozen stores, where one would

do. There are a million or two of business firms in the country, and

five or ten times as many clerks; and consider the handling and

rehandling, the accounting and reaccounting, the planning and worrying,

the balancing of petty profit and loss. Consider the whole machinery of

the civil law made necessary by these processes; the libraries of

ponderous tomes, the courts and juries to interpret them, the lawyers

studying to circumvent them, the pettifogging and chicanery, the

hatreds and lies! Consider the wastes incidental to the blind and

haphazard production of commodities—the factories closed, the workers

idle, the goods spoiling in storage; consider the activities of the

stock manipulator, the paralyzing of whole industries, the

overstimulation of others, for speculative purposes; the assignments

and bank failures, the crises and panics, the deserted towns and the

starving populations! Consider the energies wasted in the seeking of

markets, the sterile trades, such as drummer, solicitor, bill-poster,

advertising agent. Consider the wastes incidental to the crowding into

cities, made necessary by competition and by monopoly railroad rates;

consider the slums, the bad air, the disease and the waste of vital

energies; consider the office buildings, the waste of time and material

in the piling of story upon story, and the burrowing underground! Then

take the whole business of insurance, the enormous mass of

administrative and clerical labor it involves, and all utter waste—”

“I do not follow that,” said the editor. “The Cooperative Commonwealth

is a universal automatic insurance company and savings bank for all its

members. Capital being the property of all, injury to it is shared by

all and made up by all. The bank is the universal government

credit-account, the ledger in which every individual’s earnings and

spendings are balanced. There is also a universal government bulletin,

in which are listed and precisely described everything which the

commonwealth has for sale. As no one makes any profit by the sale,

there is no longer any stimulus to extravagance, and no

misrepresentation; no cheating, no adulteration or imitation, no

bribery or ‘grafting.’”

“How is the price of an article determined?”

“The price is the labor it has cost to make and deliver it, and it is

determined by the first principles of arithmetic. The million workers

in the nation’s wheat fields have worked a hundred days each, and the

total product of the labor is a billion bushels, so the value of a

bushel of wheat is the tenth part of a farm labor-day. If we employ an

arbitrary symbol, and pay, say, five dollars a day for farm work, then

the cost of a bushel of wheat is fifty cents.”

“You say ‘for farm work,’” said Mr. Maynard. “Then labor is not to be

paid alike?”

“Manifestly not, since some work is easy and some hard, and we should

have millions of rural mail carriers, and no coal miners. Of course the

wages may be left the same, and the hours varied; one or the other will

have to be varied continually, according as a greater or less number of

workers is needed in any particular industry. That is precisely what is

done at present, except that the transfer of the workers is

accomplished blindly and imperfectly, by rumors and advertisements,

instead of instantly and completely, by a universal government

bulletin.”

“How about those occupations in which time is difficult to calculate?

What is the labor cost of a book?”

“Obviously it is the labor cost of the paper, printing, and binding of

it—about a fifth of its present cost.”

“And the author?”

“I have already said that the state could not control intellectual

production. The state might say that it had taken a year to write the

book, and the author might say it had taken thirty. Goethe said that

every _bon mot_ of his had cost a purse of gold. What I outline here is

a national, or rather international, system for the providing of the

material needs of men. Since a man has intellectual needs also, he will

work longer, earn more, and provide for them to his own taste and in

his own way. I live on the same earth as the majority, I wear the same

kind of shoes and sleep in the same kind of bed; but I do not think the

same kind of thoughts, and I do not wish to pay for such thinkers as

the majority selects. I wish such things to be left to free effort, as

at present. If people want to listen to a certain preacher, they get

together and contribute what they please, and pay for a church and

support the preacher, and then listen to him; I, who do not want to

listen to him, stay away, and it costs me nothing. In the same way

there are magazines about Egyptian coins, and Catholic saints, and

flying machines, and athletic records, and I know nothing about any of

them. On the other hand, if wage slavery were abolished, and I could

earn some spare money without paying tribute to an exploiting

capitalist, then there would be a magazine for the purpose of

interpreting and popularizing the gospel of Friedrich Nietzsche, the

prophet of Evolution, and also of Horace Fletcher, the inventor of the

noble science of clean eating; and incidentally, perhaps, for the

discouraging of long skirts, and the scientific breeding of men and

women, and the establishing of divorce by mutual consent.”

Dr. Schliemann paused for a moment. “That was a lecture,” he said with

a laugh, “and yet I am only begun!”

“What else is there?” asked Maynard.

“I have pointed out some of the negative wastes of competition,”

answered the other. “I have hardly mentioned the positive economies of

co-operation. Allowing five to a family, there are fifteen million

families in this country; and at least ten million of these live

separately, the domestic drudge being either the wife or a wage slave.

Now set aside the modern system of pneumatic house-cleaning, and the

economies of co-operative cooking; and consider one single item, the

washing of dishes. Surely it is moderate to say that the dish-washing

for a family of five takes half an hour a day; with ten hours as a

day’s work, it takes, therefore, half a million able-bodied

persons—mostly women to do the dish-washing of the country. And note

that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is

a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of

prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate

children—for all of which things the community has naturally to pay.

And now consider that in each of my little free communities there would

be a machine which would wash and dry the dishes, and do it, not merely

to the eye and the touch, but scientifically—sterilizing them—and do it

at a saving of all the drudgery and nine-tenths of the time! All of

these things you may find in the books of Mrs. Gilman; and then take

Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories, and Workshops, and read about the new

science of agriculture, which has been built up in the last ten years;

by which, with made soils and intensive culture, a gardener can raise

ten or twelve crops in a season, and two hundred tons of vegetables

upon a single acre; by which the population of the whole globe could be

supported on the soil now cultivated in the United States alone! It is

impossible to apply such methods now, owing to the ignorance and

poverty of our scattered farming population; but imagine the problem of

providing the food supply of our nation once taken in hand

systematically and rationally, by scientists! All the poor and rocky

land set apart for a national timber reserve, in which our children

play, and our young men hunt, and our poets dwell! The most favorable

climate and soil for each product selected; the exact requirements of

the community known, and the acreage figured accordingly; the most

improved machinery employed, under the direction of expert agricultural

chemists! I was brought up on a farm, and I know the awful deadliness

of farm work; and I like to picture it all as it will be after the

revolution. To picture the great potato-planting machine, drawn by four

horses, or an electric motor, ploughing the furrow, cutting and

dropping and covering the potatoes, and planting a score of acres a

day! To picture the great potato-digging machine, run by electricity,

perhaps, and moving across a thousand-acre field, scooping up earth and

potatoes, and dropping the latter into sacks! To every other kind of

vegetable and fruit handled in the same way—apples and oranges picked

by machinery, cows milked by electricity—things which are already done,

as you may know. To picture the harvest fields of the future, to which

millions of happy men and women come for a summer holiday, brought by

special trains, the exactly needful number to each place! And to

contrast all this with our present agonizing system of independent

small farming,—a stunted, haggard, ignorant man, mated with a yellow,

lean, and sad-eyed drudge, and toiling from four o’clock in the morning

until nine at night, working the children as soon as they are able to

walk, scratching the soil with its primitive tools, and shut out from

all knowledge and hope, from all their benefits of science and

invention, and all the joys of the spirit—held to a bare existence by

competition in labor, and boasting of his freedom because he is too

blind to see his chains!”

Dr. Schliemann paused a moment. “And then,” he continued, “place beside

this fact of an unlimited food supply, the newest discovery of

physiologists, that most of the ills of the human system are due to

overfeeding! And then again, it has been proven that meat is

unnecessary as a food; and meat is obviously more difficult to produce

than vegetable food, less pleasant to prepare and handle, and more

likely to be unclean. But what of that, so long as it tickles the

palate more strongly?”

“How would Socialism change that?” asked the girl-student, quickly. It

was the first time she had spoken.

“So long as we have wage slavery,” answered Schliemann, “it matters not

in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may be, it is easy to

find people to perform it. But just as soon as labor is set free, then

the price of such work will begin to rise. So one by one the old,

dingy, and unsanitary factories will come down—it will be cheaper to

build new; and so the steamships will be provided with stoking

machinery, and so the dangerous trades will be made safe, or

substitutes will be found for their products. In exactly the same way,

as the citizens of our Industrial Republic become refined, year by year

the cost of slaughterhouse products will increase; until eventually

those who want to eat meat will have to do their own killing—and how

long do you think the custom would survive then?—To go on to another

item—one of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy

is political corruption; and one of the consequences of civic

administration by ignorant and vicious politicians, is that preventable

diseases kill off half our population. And even if science were allowed

to try, it could do little, because the majority of human beings are

not yet human beings at all, but simply machines for the creating of

wealth for others. They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot

and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill

faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them; and so, of

course, they remain as centers of contagion, poisoning the lives of all

of us, and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish. For

this reason I would seriously maintain that all the medical and

surgical discoveries that science can make in the future will be of

less importance than the application of the knowledge we already

possess, when the disinherited of the earth have established their

right to a human existence.”

And here the Herr Doctor relapsed into silence again. Jurgis had

noticed that the beautiful young girl who sat by the center-table was

listening with something of the same look that he himself had worn, the

time when he had first discovered Socialism. Jurgis would have liked to

talk to her, he felt sure that she would have understood him. Later on

in the evening, when the group broke up, he heard Mrs. Fisher say to

her, in a low voice, “I wonder if Mr. Maynard will still write the same

things about Socialism”; to which she answered, “I don’t know—but if he

does we shall know that he is a knave!”

And only a few hours after this came election day—when the long

campaign was over, and the whole country seemed to stand still and hold

its breath, awaiting the issue. Jurgis and the rest of the staff of

Hinds’s Hotel could hardly stop to finish their dinner, before they

hurried off to the big hall which the party had hired for that evening.

But already there were people waiting, and already the telegraph

instrument on the stage had begun clicking off the returns. When the

final accounts were made up, the Socialist vote proved to be over four

hundred thousand—an increase of something like three hundred and fifty

per cent in four years. And that was doing well; but the party was

dependent for its early returns upon messages from the locals, and

naturally those locals which had been most successful were the ones

which felt most like reporting; and so that night every one in the hall

believed that the vote was going to be six, or seven, or even eight

hundred thousand. Just such an incredible increase had actually been

made in Chicago, and in the state; the vote of the city had been 6,700

in 1900, and now it was 47,000; that of Illinois had been 9,600, and

now it was 69,000! So, as the evening waxed, and the crowd piled in,

the meeting was a sight to be seen. Bulletins would be read, and the

people would shout themselves hoarse—and then some one would make a

speech, and there would be more shouting; and then a brief silence, and

more bulletins. There would come messages from the secretaries of

neighboring states, reporting their achievements; the vote of Indiana

had gone from 2,300 to 12,000, of Wisconsin from 7,000 to 28,000; of

Ohio from 4,800 to 36,000! There were telegrams to the national office

from enthusiastic individuals in little towns which had made amazing

and unprecedented increases in a single year: Benedict, Kansas, from 26

to 260; Henderson, Kentucky, from 19 to 111; Holland, Michigan, from 14

to 208; Cleo, Oklahoma, from 0 to 104; Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, from 0 to

296—and many more of the same kind. There were literally hundreds of

such towns; there would be reports from half a dozen of them in a

single batch of telegrams. And the men who read the despatches off to

the audience were old campaigners, who had been to the places and

helped to make the vote, and could make appropriate comments: Quincy,

Illinois, from 189 to 831—that was where the mayor had arrested a

Socialist speaker! Crawford County, Kansas, from 285 to 1,975; that was

the home of the “Appeal to Reason”! Battle Creek, Michigan, from 4,261

to 10,184; that was the answer of labor to the Citizens’ Alliance

Movement!

And then there were official returns from the various precincts and

wards of the city itself! Whether it was a factory district or one of

the “silk-stocking” wards seemed to make no particular difference in

the increase; but one of the things which surprised the party leaders

most was the tremendous vote that came rolling in from the stockyards.

Packingtown comprised three wards of the city, and the vote in the

spring of 1903 had been 500, and in the fall of the same year, 1,600.

Now, only one year later, it was over 6,300—and the Democratic vote

only 8,800! There were other wards in which the Democratic vote had

been actually surpassed, and in two districts, members of the state

legislature had been elected. Thus Chicago now led the country; it had

set a new standard for the party, it had shown the workingmen the way!

—So spoke an orator upon the platform; and two thousand pairs of eyes

were fixed upon him, and two thousand voices were cheering his every

sentence. The orator had been the head of the city’s relief bureau in

the stockyards, until the sight of misery and corruption had made him

sick. He was young, hungry-looking, full of fire; and as he swung his

long arms and beat up the crowd, to Jurgis he seemed the very spirit of

the revolution. “Organize! Organize! Organize!”—that was his cry. He

was afraid of this tremendous vote, which his party had not expected,

and which it had not earned. “These men are not Socialists!” he cried.

“This election will pass, and the excitement will die, and people will

forget about it; and if you forget about it, too, if you sink back and

rest upon your oars, we shall lose this vote that we have polled

to-day, and our enemies will laugh us to scorn! It rests with you to

take your resolution—now, in the flush of victory, to find these men

who have voted for us, and bring them to our meetings, and organize

them and bind them to us! We shall not find all our campaigns as easy

as this one. Everywhere in the country tonight the old party

politicians are studying this vote, and setting their sails by it; and

nowhere will they be quicker or more cunning than here in our own city.

Fifty thousand Socialist votes in Chicago means a municipal-ownership

Democracy in the spring! And then they will fool the voters once more,

and all the powers of plunder and corruption will be swept into office

again! But whatever they may do when they get in, there is one thing

they will not do, and that will be the thing for which they were

elected! They will not give the people of our city municipal

ownership—they will not mean to do it, they will not try to do it; all

that they will do is give our party in Chicago the greatest opportunity

that has ever come to Socialism in America! We shall have the sham

reformers self-stultified and self-convicted; we shall have the radical

Democracy left without a lie with which to cover its nakedness! And

then will begin the rush that will never be checked, the tide that will

never turn till it has reached its flood—that will be irresistible,

overwhelming—the rallying of the outraged workingmen of Chicago to our

standard! And we shall organize them, we shall drill them, we shall

marshal them for the victory! We shall bear down the opposition, we

shall sweep if before us—and _Chicago will be ours!_ Chicago will be

ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!”