Upton Sinclair Quotes

“It was nearly a year and a half ago that Jurgis had met Ona, at a horse fair a hundred miles from home. Jurgis had never expected to get married – he had laughed at it as a foolish trap for a man to walk into; but here, without ever having spoken a word to her, with no more than the exchange of half a dozen smiles, he found himself, purple in the face with embarrassment and terror, asking her parents to sell her to him for his wife – and offering his father’s two horses he had been sent to the fair to sell. But Ona’s father proved as a rock – the girl was yet a child, and he was a rich man, and his daughter was not to be had in that way. So Jurgis went home with a heavy heart, and that spring and summer toiled and tried hard to forget. In the fall, after the harvest was over, he saw that it would not do, and tramped the full fortnight’s journey that lay between him and Ona.”

“As it chanced, [Jurgis] had been hurt on a Monday, and had just paid for his last week’s board and his room rent, and spent nearly all the balance of his Saturday’s pay. He had less than seventy-five cents in his pockets, and a dollar and a half due him for the day’s work he had done before he was hurt. He might possibly have sued the company, and got some damages for his injuries, but he did not know this, and it was not the company’s business to tell him.”

“There came no answer to it, however, and at last, the day before New Year’s, Jurgis bade good-by to Jack Duane. The latter gave him his address, or rather the address of his mistress, and made Jurgis promise to look him up. ‘Maybe I could help you out of a hole some day,’ he said, and added that he was sorry to have him go.”

″[Jurgis] could not hear it often enough; he could not ask with enough variations. Yes, they had bought the house, they had really bought it. It belonged to them, they had only to pay the money and it would be all right. Then Jurgis covered his face with his hands, for there were tears in his eyes, and he felt like a fool. But he had had such a horrible fright; strong man as he was, it left him almost too weak to stand up.”

“Ona might have married and left them, but she would not, for she loved Teta Elzbieta. It was Jonas who suggested that they all go to America, where a friend of his had gotten rich. He would work, for his part, and the women would work, and some of the children, doubtless – they would live somehow. Jurgis, too, had heard of America. That was a country where, they said, a man might earn three rubles a day; and Jurgis figured what three rubles a day would mean, with prices as they were where he lived, and decided forthwith that he would go to America and marry, and be a rich man in the bargain. In that country, rich or poor, a man was free, it was said; he did not have to go into the army, he did not have to pay out his money to rascally officials – he might do as he pleased, and count himself as good as any other man.”

“Excepting for that one walk when he left jail, when he was too much worried to notice anything, and for a few times that he had rested in the city parks in the winter time when he was out of work, he had literally never seen a tree! And now he felt like a bird lifted up and borne away upon a gale; he stopped and stared at each new sight of wonder—at a herd of cows, and a meadow full of daisies, at hedgerows set thick with June roses, at little birds singing in the trees.”

“So in the summer time they had all set out for America. At the last moment there joined them Marija Berczynskas, who was a cousin of Ona’s. Marija was an orphan, and had worked since childhood for a rich farmer of Vilna, who beat her regularly. It was only at the age of twenty that it had occurred to Marija to try her strength, when she had risen up and nearly murdered the man, and then come away.”

″‘Little one,’ he said, in a low voice, ‘do not worry – it will not matter to us. We will pay them all somehow. I will work harder.’ That was always what Jurgis said. Ona had grown used to it as the solution of all difficulties – ‘I will work harder!’ He had said that in Lithuania when one official had taken his passport from him, and another had arrested him for being without it, and the two had divided a third of his belongings. He had said it again in New York, when the smooth-spoken agent had taken them in hand and made them pay such high prices, and almost prevented their leaving his place, in spite of their paying. Now he said it a third time, and Ona drew a deep breath; it was so wonderful to have a husband, just like a grown woman – and a husband who could solve all problems, and who was so big and strong!”

“Of these older people many wear clothing reminiscent in some detail of home – an embroidered waistcoat or stomacher, or a gaily colored handkerchief, or a coat with large cuffs and fancy buttons. All these things are carefully avoided by the young, most of whom have learned to speak English and to affect the latest style of clothing. The girls wear ready-made dresses or shirt waists, and some of them look quite pretty. Some of the young men you would take to be Americans, of the type of clerks, but for the fact that they wear their hats in the room.”

“Jurgis had first come to the stockyards he had been as clean as any workingman could well be. But later on, what with sickness and cold and hunger and discouragement, and the filthiness of his work, and the vermin in his home, he had given up washing in winter, and in summer only as much of him as would go into a basin. He had had a shower bath in jail, but nothing since—and now he would have a swim!”

“It was like breakers upon a beach; there was new water, but the wave looked just the same. He strolled about and talked with them, and the biggest of them told tales of their prowess, while those who were weaker, or younger and inexperienced, gathered round and listened in admiring silence. The last time he was there, Jurgis had thought of little but his family; but now he was free to listen to these men, and to realize that he was one of them—that their point of view was his point of view, and that the way they kept themselves alive in the world was the way he meant to do it in the future.”

“Jurgis was confident of his ability to get work for himself, unassisted by any one. As we have said before, he was not mistaken in this. He had gone to Brown’s and stood there not more than half an hour before one of the bosses noticed his form towering above the rest, and signaled to him. The colloquy which followed was brief and to the point: ‘Speak English?’ ‘No; Lit-uanian.’ (Jurgis had studied this word carefully.) ‘Job?’ ‘Je.’ (A nod.)”

“Better luck than all this could hardly have been hoped for; there was only one of them left to seek a place. Jurgis was determined that Teta Elzbieta should stay at home to keep house, and that Ona should help her. He would not have Ona working – he was not that sort of a man, he said, and she was not that sort of a woman. It would be a strange thing if a man like him could not support the family, with the help of the board of Jonas and Marija. He would not even hear of letting the children go to work – there were schools here in America for children, Jurgis had heard, to which they could go for nothing. […] Jurgis would have it that Stanislovas should learn to speak English, and grow up to be a skilled man.”

“Promptly at seven the next morning Jurgis reported for work. He came to the door that had been pointed out to him, and there he waited for nearly two hours. The boss had meant for him to enter, but had not said this, and so it was only when on his way out to hire another man that he came upon Jurgis. He gave him a good cursing, but as Jurgis did not understand a word of it he did not object.”

“So, bit by bit, the feast takes form – there is a ham and a dish of sauerkraut, boiled rice, macaroni, bologna sausages, great piles of penny buns, bowls of milk, and foaming pitchers of beer. There is also, not six feet from your back, the bar, where you may order all you please and do not have to pay for it. “Eiksz! Graicziau!” screams Marija Berczynskas, and falls to work herself – for there is more upon the stove inside that will be spoiled if it be not eaten.”

“The peculiar bitterness of all this was that Jurgis saw so plainly the meaning of it. In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he had gotten a job the first day; but now he was second-hand, a damaged article, so to speak, and they did not want him. They had got the best of him – they had worn him out, with their speeding-up and their carelessness, and now they had thrown him away! And Jurgis would make the acquaintance of others of these unemployed men and find that they had all had the same experience.”

“There were hardened criminals and innocent men too poor to give bail; old men, and boys literally not yet in their teens. They were the drainage of the great festering ulcer of society […] Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.”

“For every one that Jurgis spoke to assured him that it was a waste of time to seek employment for the old man in Packingtown. Szedvilas told him that the packers did not even keep the men who had grown old in their own service – to say nothing of taking on new ones. And not only was it the rule here, it was the rule everywhere in America, so far as he knew.”

“A very few days of practical experience in this land of high wages had been sufficient to make clear to them the cruel fact that it was also a land of high prices, and that in it the poor man was almost as poor as in any other corner of the earth; and so there vanished in a night all the wonderful dreams of wealth that had been haunting Jurgis. What had made the discovery all the more painful was that they were spending, at American prices, money which they had earned at home rates of wages – and so were really being cheated by the world! The last two days they had all but starved themselves – it made them quite sick to pay the prices that the railroad people asked them for food.”

″‘I hit him, sir,’ said Jurgis. ‘Say ‘your Honor,″ said the officer, pinching his arm hard. ‘Your Honor,’ said Jurgis, obediently. ‘You tried to choke him?’ ‘Yes, sir, your Honor.’ ‘Ever been arrested before?’ ‘No, sir, your Honor.’ ‘What have you to say for yourself?’ Jurgis hesitated. What had he to say? In two years and a half he had learned to speak English for practical purposes, but these had never included the statement that some one had intimidated and seduced his wife.”

There are able-bodied men here who work from early morning until late at night, in ice-cold cellars with a quarter of an inch of water on the floor—men who for six or seven months in the year never see the sunlight from Sunday afternoon till the next Sunday morning—

“This information is definite and suited to the matter of fact; but how pitifully inadequate it would have seemed to one who understood that it was also the supreme hour of ecstasy in the life of one of God’s gentlest creatures, the scene of the wedding feast and the joy-transfiguration of little Ona Lukoszaite!”

Most fearful they are to contemplate, the expenses of this entertainment.

There are able-bodied men here who work from early morning until late at night, in ice-cold cellars with a quarter of an inch of water on the floor—men who for six or seven months in the year never see the sunlight from Sunday afternoon till the next Sunday morning—

There are little children here, scarce in their teens, who can hardly see the top of the work benches—whose parents have lied to get them their places—

“Stay, thou art fair!”

What are you paid for, children of hell?”

“Little one, do not worry—it will not matter to us. We will pay them all somehow. I will work harder.”

“In the good old summertime—in the good old summertime! In the good old summertime—in the good old summertime!”

“Leave it to me; leave it to me. I will earn more money—I will work harder.”

“Yes, but what sort of men? Broken down tramps and good for nothings, fellows who have spent all their money drinking, and want to get more for it. Do you want me to believe that with these arms and he would clench his fists and hold them up in the air, so that you might see the rolling muscles that with these arms people will ever let me starve?”

“Why, when they said ‘Chicago,’ people no longer pointed in some direction...”

“Tomorrow”, “I will get a job, and perhaps Jonas will get one also; and then we can get a place of our own.”

“And what will become of all these creatures?” cried Teta Elzbieta.

“By tonight,” Jokubas answered, “they will all be killed and cut up; and over there on the other side of the packing houses are more railroad tracks, where the cars come to take them away.”

Is she discouraged, does she drag herself about the house and find fault with everything? Why do you not tell her to try Dr. Lanahan’s Life Preservers?

For most of the men here took a fearfully different view of the thing. They hated their work. They hated the bosses and they hated the owners; they hated the whole place, the whole neighborhood -even the whole city, with an all-inclusive hatred.

It’s simply some boss who proposes to add a little to his income.

After Jurgis had been there awhile he would know that the plants were simply honeycombed with rottenness of that sort—

The bosses grafted off the men, and they grafted off each other; and some day the superintendent would find out about the boss, and then he would graft off the boss.

Here was Durham’s, for instance, owned by a man who was trying to make as much money out of it as he could, and did not care in the least how he did it;

And underneath him, ranged in ranks and grades like an army, were managers and superintendents and foremen, each one driving the man next below him and trying to squeeze out of him as much work as possible.

There was no loyalty or decency anywhere about it, there was no place in it where a man counted for anything against a dollar.

And worse than there being no decency, there was not even any honesty.

It would be a strange thing if a man like him could not support the family, with the help of the board of Jonas and Marija.

“Why pay rent? Why not own your own home? Do you know that you can buy one for less than your rent? We have built thousands of homes which are now occupied by happy families.”

“it was quite in vain that the agent hinted at promptness—”

“How was a poor man to know?”

“It was all nothing but robbery, and there was no safety but in keeping out of it.”

“If there is anything wrong, do not give him the money, but go out and get a lawyer.”

Yes, they had bought the house, they had really bought it. It belonged to them, they had only to pay the money and it would be all right.

Jurgis and Ona were very much in love; they had waited a long time - it was now well into the second year, and Jurgis judged everything by the criterion of its helping or hindering their union.

Even the tricks and cruelties he saw at Durham’ s had little meaning for him just then, save as they might happen to affect his future with Ona.

To be sure there had been a great many of them, which was a common failing in Packingtown; but they had worked hard, and the father had been a steady man, and they had a good deal more than half paid for the house. But he had been killed in an elevator accident in Durham’s.

“You say twelve dollars a month; but that does not include the interest.”

“I will work harder.”

He was deeply pained, he said. He had not told them, simply because he had supposed they would understand that they had to pay interest upon their debt, as a matter of course.

“Yes, perhaps it would be best; we will all have to make some sacrifices now.”

“Come now, brother, give us a tune.”

“Now we’re working for the church!”

what she thought of a world where such things were allowed to happen

“Deeper their heart grows and nobler their bearing, Whose youth in the fires of anguish hath died.”

“Deeper their heart grows and nobler their bearing, Whose youth in the fires of anguish hath died.”

She was shut up in one of the rooms where the people seldom saw the daylight;

And as for Tamoszius—well, they had waited a long time, and they could wait a little longer. But day by day the music of Tamoszius’ violin became more passionate and heartbreaking;

Ona, it was no strain sitting still sewing hams all day; and if she waited longer she might find that her dreadful forelady had put some one else in her place.

“it seemed such a slight offense, and the punishment was so out of all proportion”

“Perhaps they had a secret process for making chickens chemically—who knows?”

“Come now, brother, give us a tune.”

Each crisis would leave Jurgis more and more frightened, phrases of anguish and despair now and then, amid her frantic weeping.

“I was afraid—I was just afraid!” sobbed Ona. “I knew you wouldn’t know where I was, and I didn’t know what you might do. I tried to get home, but I was so tired. Oh, Jurgis, Jurgis!”

“She said here,” insisted Jurgis. “She told me all about you, and how you were, and what you said. Are you sure? You haven’t forgotten? You weren’t away?”

She was lost on the street all night, and I’ve only just succeeded in getting her quiet.

“You have lied to me, I say!” he cried. “You told me you had been to Jadvyga’s house that other night, and you hadn’t. You had been where you were last night—somewheres downtown, for I saw you get off the car. Where were you?”

He had to bend down to her, she was so weak. She was pleading with him, in broken phrases, painfully uttered: “Have faith in me! Believe me!”

“Believe that I—that I know best—that I love you! And do not ask me—what you did. Oh, Jurgis, please, please! It is for the best—it is—”

“If you will only do it! If you will only—only believe me! It wasn’t my fault—I couldn’t help it—it will be all right—it is nothing—it is no harm. Oh, Jurgis—please, please!”

“Oh, believe me, believe me!”

You must not do it! It will drive me mad—it will kill me—no, no, Jurgis, I am crazy—it is nothing.

You do not really need to know. We can be happy—we can love each other just the same.

“He told me—he would have me turned off. He told me he would—we would all of us lose our places. We could never get anything to do—here—again. He—he meant it—he would have ruined us.”

I was afraid of him—afraid to cry out.”

It set every nerve of him a- tremble, it aroused all the demon in his soul.

Things swam blood before him, and he screamed aloud in his fury, lifting his victim and smashing his head upon the floor.

What happened to a man after any of these things, all depended upon the circumstances.

An unmarried man could save, if he did not drink, and if he was absolutely selfish—that is, if he paid no heed to the demands of his old parents, or of his little brothers and sisters, or of any other relatives he might have, as well as of the members of his union, and his chums, and the people who might be starving to death next door.

What did a man who worked in Durham’s fertilizer mill care about anything that the world might do to him!

And they would lose it all; they would be turned out into the streets, and have to hide in some icy garret, and live or die as best they could!

Jurgis sat gazing about the room for an hour or two; he was in hopes that some one of the family would come, but in this he was disappointed.

Jurgis: Ah, it was too cruel! Why at least had they not left him alone—why, after they had shut him in jail, must they be ringing Christmas chimes in his ears!

But a big man cannot stay drunk very long on three dollars.

That was Sunday morning, and Monday night Jurgis came home, sober and sick, realizing that he had spent every cent the family owned, and had not bought a single instant’s forgetfulness with it.

Oh, please treasure it and protect it! You must show yourself a man.

They might trust him, he would keep his word, come what might.

“it will not be worth your while to wait—there will be nothing for you here.”

“The first time I had an accident, and the last time I was sent up for a month. I see. Well, I’ll give you a trial. Come early tomorrow and ask for Mr. Thomas.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but I made a mistake. I can’t use you.”

This let him into a lodging-house on several nights when he might otherwise have frozen to death; and it also gave him a chance now and then to buy a newspaper in the morning and hunt up jobs while his rivals were watching and waiting for a paper to be thrown away.

when it was explained to him what “big money” he and all his family could make by coloring photographs, he could only promise to come in again when he had two dollars to invest in the outfit.

“How much do you pay?” she demanded. “Must I pay now—right away?” “Yes; all my customers do.” “I—I haven’t much money,” Jurgis began in an agony of dread. “I’ve been in—in trouble—and my money is gone. But I’ll pay you—every cent—just as soon as I can; I can work—”

“I have no place now. I must get one. But I—”

“I’ve just been in jail,” Jurgis cried—he was ready to get down upon his knees to the woman—“and I had no money before, and my family has almost starved.”

“They are all poor,” he answered. “They gave me this. I have done everything I can—”

“I have nothing, I tell you—I have nothing,” he cried, frantically.

“Listen to me—if you git me you vill be glad of it. I vill save your wife und baby for you, and it vill not seem like mooch to you in de end. If you loose dem now how you tink you feel den?”

“You von’t find nobody go out on a rainy day like dis for less.”

“It is not good to think of anybody suffering,” she said, in a melancholy voice.

“Now,” she said, “you go away. Do as I tell you—you have done all you can, and you are only in the way. Go away and stay away.”

“I’ve been in jail,” he said, “and I’ve just got out. I walked home all the way, and I’ve not a cent, and had nothing to eat since this morning. And I’ve lost my home, and my wife’s ill, and I’m done up.”

“I can do noffing more—dere is no use to try.”

Their sacrifices in the beginning, their three hundred dollars that they had scraped together, all they owned in the world, all that stood between them and starvation!

Why, they had put their very souls into their payments on that house, they had paid for it with their sweat and tears—yes, more, with their very lifeblood.

“A wild, horrible scream of anguish.”

“We had no money—we have scarcely been able to keep alive.”

“But I can work,” Jurgis exclaimed. “I can earn money!”

“The children have not been home for three days, the weather has been so bad. They could not know what is happening—it came suddenly, two months before we expected it.”

“and try and get somebody yourself. And maybe the rest can help—give him some money, you; he will pay you back some day, and it will do him good to have something to think about, even if he doesn’ t succeed. When he comes back, maybe it will be over.”

“I thought I’d been up against ‘em all.

“I see. You’re what’s called an honest workingman!”

“He spoke like a man of education, like what the world calls a ‘gentleman.‘”

“I’m here for disorderly conduct. They were mad because they couldn’t get any evidence.”

“Young fellow had an amused contempt for Jurgis, as a sort of working mule; he, too, had felt the world’s injustice, but instead of bearing it patiently, he had struck back, and struck hard.”

His story came out, not in the first day, nor the second, but in the long hours that dragged by, in which they had nothing to do but talk and nothing to talk of but themselves.

This wasn’t a world in which a man had any business with a family; sooner or later Jurgis would find that out also, and give up the fight and shift for himself.

“Maybe I could help you out of a hole some day”

“I have a wife and baby, sir, and they have no money—my God, they will starve to death!”

“You would have done well to think about them before you committed the assault,”

“Yes, she’s been selling papers, too. She does best, because she’s a girl.

“Mother hasn’t any work either, because the sausage department is shut down; and she goes and begs at houses with a basket, and people give her food.”

It had happened that way before, said the men, and it would happen that way forever.

Nobody’s fault—that was the way of it;

“I want men for hard work—it’s all underground, digging tunnels for telephones. Maybe it won’t suit you.”

“What did he know about sin and suffering—”

“Please, sir,” said Jurgis, “can I have something to eat? I can pay.” To which the farmer responded promptly, “We don’t feed tramps here. Get out!”

“There ought to be work a strong fellow like you can find to do, in the cities, or some place, in the winter time.”

“Yes,” said Jurgis, “that’s what they all think; and so they crowd into the cities, and when they have to beg or steal to live, then people ask ‘em why they don’t go into the country, where help is scarce.”

“Please, sir,” he began, in the usual formula, “will you give me the price of a lodging? I’ve had a broken arm, and I can’t work, and I’ve not a cent in my pocket. I’m an honest working-man, sir, and I never begged before! It’s not my fault, sir—”

“That ain’t so bad—you get over that. I wish somebody’d break my arm, ole chappie—damfidon’t! Then they’d treat me better—hic—hole me up, ole sport! Whuzzit you wamme do?”

“No money! Ho, ho—less be chums, ole boy—jess like me! No money, either—almost busted! Why don’t you go home, then, same’s me? “I haven’t any home,” said Jurgis.”

Only ole Ham standin’ by, passin’ plates—damfican eat like that, no sir! The club for me every time, my boy, I say. But then they won’t lemme sleep there—guv’ner’s orders, by Harry—home every night, sir!”

Farewell, farewell, my own true love—farewell, farewehell, my—own true—love!‘”

‘I know you! But I’m no more drunk than you are, Kittens,’ says I to her.

“Hangin’ on the verge of starvation,′ I says—‘for the honor of the family—hic—sen’ me some bread.”

“Shake hands on it, ole man—by Harry!

“Don’t you want anything?” Jurgis asked. Ain’t hungry,” was the reply—“only thirsty. Kitty and me had some candy—you go on.”

He smiled at Jurgis confidingly, and then started talking again, with his blissful insouciance.

“I’ll mash in your face for you before you get out of here!”

“I’ll see you in hell first.”

“Have ‘em!” roared Jurgis, with fierce passion.

“But,” said Jurgis, “how could I ever be of any use to you—in politics?”

“I could be a Democrat,”

“I thought I could count on you,” began Jurgis. “Yes,” responded Scully, “so you could—I never yet went back on a friend.

It wouldn’t do for me to tell other men what I tell you, but you’ve been on the inside, and you ought to have sense enough to see for yourself.

Yes, he knew the work, the whole of it, and he could teach it to others.

“No discrimination against union men.”

“We all go back or none of us do!”

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

“It’s off, boys. We’ll all of us quit again!”

Precisely as before, Jurgis came away with a piece of his enemy’s flesh between his teeth;

“It was a man that did me a mean trick once,”

“Good God!” exclaimed the other, “then you’re in for it, old man! I can’t help you!”

He had come out ahead on that deal!

“Never mind,” said Jurgis; “I’ve got it, and I want it changed. I’ll pay you if you’ll do it.”

And an instant horror reigned in him—black, paralyzing, awful horror, clutching him at the heart;

“He’s got no more fight in him, I guess—and he’s only got a block to go.”

“You had been drinking as well as begging last night, had you not?”

“I had a bottle of something—I don’t know what it was—something that burned—”

“You ought to stop drinking if you can’t control yourself.

“By God, if it isn’t ‘the Stinker’!”

“And what is it—have you been through a sausage machine?”

“No,” said Jurgis, “but I’ve been in a railroad wreck and a fight.”

“Hard luck, old man,” he said, when they were alone; “but maybe it’s taught you a lesson.”

“I’ve no place to go,” said Jurgis, sadly. “Neither have I,” replied the other, laughing lightly. “But we’ll wait till we get out and see.”

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

If Jurgis did not believe it, he could try it, said the little Jew—let them meet at a certain house on the morrow and make a test.

the Republicans were good fellows, too, and were to have a pile of money in this next campaign.

″‘Sheeny’—was a Jew, and had no brains, but he was harmless, and would put up a rare campaign fund.”

“A man had to be a fool to be a Republican in the stockyards, where Scully was king.”

“It’s a go, then; I’m your man.”

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

“I got into a quarrel with a foreman—not my own boss, sir—and struck him.”

“How would it suit you to be a night watchman?” “That wouldn’t do, sir. I have to be among the men at night.”

Poor Jurgis was now an outcast and a tramp once more.

He was crippled—he was as literally crippled as any wild animal which has lost its claws, or been torn out of its shell.

He had been shorn, at one cut, of all those mysterious weapons whereby he had been able to make a living easily and to escape the consequences of his actions.

Nay worse, he dared not mingle with the herd—he must hide himself, for he was one marked out for destruction.

He would cry out for the awfulness of it

He would wake up in the night, shuddering, and bathed in perspiration, and start up and flee.

What agony it was to him to look back upon those golden hours, when he, too, had a place beneath the shadow of the plum tree!

“We’re just firing a bum! Go ahead, old sport!”

“I—I’ve had hard luck,” he stammered. I’m out of work, and I’ve no home and no money.”

“Police! Police! We’re pinched!”

“You might as well quit, you people. We mean business, this time.”

“Get your clothes on now, girls, and come along. You’d best begin, or you’ll be sorry—it’s raining outside.”

“I couldn’t lie to her. And maybe the children have found out by this time. It’s nothing to be ashamed of—we can’t help it.”

“I haven’t seen him for over a year. He got blood poisoning and lost one finger, and couldn’t play the violin any more; and then he went away.”

“No,” she answered, “I don’t blame you. We never have—any of us. You did your best—the job was too much for us.”

“We were too ignorant—that was the trouble. We didn’t stand any chance. If I’d known what I know now we’d have won out.”

“Marija, reaching for her hat, which was big enough to be a drum major’s, and full of ostrich feathers.

“The raid, you mean? Oh, nothing—it happens to us every now and then.

The madame’s having some sort of time with the police; I don’t know what it is, but maybe they’ll come to terms before morning.

Anyhow, they won’t do anything to you. They always let the men off.”

“I’m wanted by the police,”

Jurgis: (thoughts) Yes—told him that he ought to have sold his wife’s honor and lived by it!

She could not keep her past a secret—girls had tried it, and they were always found out.

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.

That the church was in the hands of the merchants at the moment was obvious enough;

“I will grant you Jesus,” interrupted the other.

‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth!’

‘Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of Heaven!’

‘Verily, I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of Heaven!’

“This Jesus of Nazareth!”

“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—”

“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.”

“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?

“Communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual”

“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?”

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.

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.

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—”

“How about those occupations in which time is difficult to calculate? What is the labor cost of a book?”

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.

“That was a lecture,” he said with a laugh, “and yet I am only begun!”

“Consider one single item, the washing of dishes.”

“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—”

“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!”

“How would Socialism change that?” asked the girl-student, quickly. It was the first time she had spoken.

“But just as soon as labor is set free, then the price of such work will begin to rise.

until eventually those who want to eat meat will have to do their own killing—

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.

poisoning the lives of all of us, and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish.

“These men are not Socialists!”

“I’m an honest man, and I’m strong and willing—”

Capitalism, my boy, capitalism!

“And all of the trusts that I have named are railroad trusts—save only the Beef Trust!”

“The Beef Trust has defied the railroads—”

“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—”

It was so incomprehensible how a man could fail to see it!