 CHAPTER XXVIII. After breakfast, Yorgos was driven to the court, which was crowded with the prisoners and those who had come out of curiosity or in the hope of recognizing one of the men and getting a case for blackmail. The men were called first and reprimanded in a bunch and then dismissed, but Yorgos to his terror was called separately as being a suspicious looking case. It was in this very same court that he had been tried, that time when his sentence had been suspended. It was the same judge and the same clerk. The latter now stared at Yorgos as if he half thought that he knew him, but the judge had no suspicions. Just then his thoughts were upon a telephone message he was expecting from a friend of the police captain of the district telling what disposition he should make of the case of Polly Simpson as the madam of the house was known. Meantime he listened to the story of how Yorgos had been looking for his sister and advised him dryly to keep his sister in a better place. Then he let him go and proceeded to find each of the girls five dollars, which fines were paid in a bunch from a wad of bills which Madam Polly extracted from her stocking. Yorgos waited outside and walked home with Maria. The police had left the house and already there were a few visitors. By evening the place would be running again, exactly as if nothing had happened. Then Maria took Yorgos upstairs to her room and they sat and talked. By daylight Yorgos was able to observe that the color of her cheeks was not the old natural one of abounding health. Her complexion was in reality a parchment yellow and there were black rings under her eyes. "'Have you been sick?' he asked. "'Sick!' she said. "'Hell!' Maria had learned to scatter her conversation with as many oaks as a long shoreman or a mule driver. How can I ever be anything but sick at this life?' She fell silent for a moment, staring ahead of her gloomily. "'It's morphine,' she said at last. "'I seem to take more of it every day.' "'What's that for?' he asked. "'It's the way of it. I don't know why. If it isn't that, it's drink. If the girls didn't booze they couldn't stand it any time at all. And the madam always gives them dope when they first come and they learn to like it. Or else they take it for headaches and such things and get the habit that way. "'I've got it, I know. I've tried to quit, but I never will while I'm here.' "'How long are you going to stay?' he asked. "'I don't know,' she said. "'Always, I guess. What else could I do?' "'Don't you save any money?' "'Save,' said Maria. "'Good Lord, no. I get enough, I suppose, but it all goes. I get a half share, two dollars and a half for each customer, and sometimes I make twenty-five or thirty dollars a night, and you'd think I ought to save something out of that. But then I am charged for my room and my meals, and such prices as you never heard of, and then for extras and drinks for everything I get, and some I don't. My laundry bill is nearly twenty dollars each week alone. Think of that. Yet what can I do? I either have to stand it or quit, and it would be the same anywhere else. It's all I can do to save the fifteen dollars I give Elsevita each week, so the children can go to school. Maria sat brooding in silence for a while, then seeing that Jörges was interested, she went on. That's the way they keep the girls. They let them run up debts so they can't get away. A young girl comes from abroad, and she doesn't know a word of English, and she gets into a place like this, and when she wants to go, the madam shows her that she is a couple of hundred dollars in debt, and takes all her clothes away, and threatens to have her arrested if she doesn't stay and do as she's told. So she stays, and the longer she stays, the more in debt she gets. And two, they are girls that didn't know what they were coming to, that had hired out for housework. Did you notice that little French girl with a yellow hair that stood next to me in the court? Jörges answered in the affirmative. 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. 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 absent. 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 Jörges. I heard of it afterward. It had happened in the place where he and Dwayne had taken refuge from their country customer. The girl had become insane, fortunately for the police. There's lots of money in it, said Maria. They get as much as forty dollars ahead for the 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 madam 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, where I wouldn't live in the same house with one of them. Maria 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, older young, black or white, and doing it because she likes to. Some of them say they do, said Jörges. 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. Maria sat for a minute or two, brooding somberly. Tell me about yourself, Jörges, 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 Dwayne and of his political career in the stockyards, and his downfall and subsequent failures. Maria 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 Maria. 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, Jörges had a good appetite, and they had a little feast together, talking, meanwhile, of Elzbita and the children and old times. Only before they were through there came another colored girl with the message that Madame wanted Maria, Lithuanian Mary, as they called her here. That means you have to go, she said to Jörges. So he got up and she gave him the address of the family, a tenement over in the Ghetto District. You go there, she said, they'll be glad to see you. But Jörges stood, hesitating. I, I don't like to, he said. Honest, Maria, why don't you just give me a little money and let me look for work first. How do you need money, was a 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 Maria, 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, goodbye. So Jörges 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 Jörges 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 straight away forgot all about his surroundings. Would Elzbeta think that he had come to sponge off her, or would she understand that he meant to get 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 job before he went. If that last boss had only been willing to try him. Then suddenly Jörges 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 Jörges. 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? Jörges 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 Elspita 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, Maria was willing, and Maria was furnishing the money. If Elspita were ugly, he would tell her that in so many words. So Jörges 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 Jörges' 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. Jörges 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 the 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. Jörges heard his voice vaguely, but all his thoughts were for this woman's face. A feeling of alarm stalled 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 anyone 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, 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 Jörges 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. Jörges 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 and great excitement. He used many gestures. He spoke as he moved here and there upon the stage, reaching with his long arms as it deceased each person in his audience. His voice was deep like an organ. It was some time, however, before Jörges 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 Jörges 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've listened 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 worldwide 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 circumstances 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 murders, 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 obliquity, 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 fraught 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 the southern cotton mill, staggering with exhaustion, numb with agony, and knowing no hope but the grave, of the mother who sows by candlelight in her tenement garret, wearing 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 bravel and the lake. With the voice of those whoever and wherever they may be who are caught beneath the wheels of the joggernaut 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 Jörges 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 near 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 streetway, a boot-black, 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 20th century, 1900 years since the Prince of Peace was born on earth, 1900 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 a 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 two equipped men to destroy each other. We called 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 from you. Come home with me then. Come here to Chicago. Here in this city tonight, 10,000 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. Tonight in Chicago there are 10,000 men, homeless and wretched, willing to work and begging for a chance, yet starving and fronting in terror of 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 money 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, 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 real 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 whole 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 entrench themselves in their privileges, to dig wider and deeper the channels through which the river of profits flows to them. And you, working men, working men, 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 so debased that he dare rise up before me and say that he believes that 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 manatee 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 stammering 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 wild 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 brought 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 up, 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 Jörgis 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 flight, 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 fingertips, and his breath came hard and fast. The sentences of this man were teurgas 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 born by a human creature, a thing of terror and madness. What, asked the prophet, is the murder of them that killed the body, to the murder of them that killed the soul, and eurgas 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 all of 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. End of Chapter 28, Recording by Tom Weiss Chapter 29 of The Jungle This leverbox recording is in the public domain, recording by Tom Weiss The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Chapter 29 The man had gone back to a seat upon the platform, and Jörges realized that his speech was over. The applause continued for several minutes, and then someone started a song, and the crowd took it up, and the place shook with it. Jörges 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 Marseilles. 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 throldom 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 Yurgis sat back. The chairman of the meeting came forward and began to speak. His voice sounded thin and futile after the others, and to Yurgis it seemed a proponation. Why should anyone 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. Yurgis heard, but he had not a penny to give, and so his thoughts went elsewhere again. He kept his eyes fixed on the order, who sat in an armchair, his head leaning on his hand, and his attitude indicating exhaustion, but suddenly he stood up again, and Yurgis 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 someone, a woman, arose and asked about some opinion the speaker had expressed concerning Tolstoy. Yurgis had never heard of Tolstoy, and did not care anything about him. Why should anyone want to ask such questions after an address like that? The thing was not to talk, but to do. The thing was to get hold 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 Yurgis 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 a 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 smelt 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 Yurgis 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, and 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 order, and he was to go away. No, no, it was preposterous. He must speak to someone. 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. Yurgis 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 Yurgis 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 Yurgis. There seemed to be a slight hint of inquiry about it, and a sudden impulse seized the other. He stepped forward. I want it to thank you, sir, he began in breakfast 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 anyone, he began. But the other held up his hand. Wait, he said. He has something to say to me. And then he looked in the Yurgis face. You want to know more about socialism? He asked. Yurgis 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 Yurgis. 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 Ostrinsky, but he is a pole. Ostrinsky 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 Yurgis again. He had deep black eyes and a face full of gentleness and pain. You must excuse me, Kamrade, he said. I am just tired out. I am spoken every day for the last month. I will introduce you to someone 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 Yurgis as Kamrade Ostrinsky. Kamrade Ostrinsky was a little man, scarcely up to Yurgis' 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 Yurgis 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 Yurgis made farewell to the master wizard and went out. Ostrinsky 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 Yurgis' arm tightly. You have been through the milk, comrade, he said. We will make a fighter out of you. Then Ostrinsky in turn explained his circumstances. He would have asked Yurgis 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 Yurgis 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 Ostrinsky. We tried not to let a comrade starve. Ostrinsky'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 Yurgis 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 Ostrinsky 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 Yurgis 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 socialist. Ostrynsky 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 25,000 members who paid dues to support the organization. Local Cook County, as the city organization was called, had 80 branch locals, and it alone was spending several thousand dollars in the campaign. It published a weekly in English and won 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 Ostrynsky first came to Chicago. Ostrynsky was a pole about 50 years of age. He had lived in Seligia, a member of a despised and persecuted race, and had taken part in the proletarian movement in the early 70s, when Bismarck, having conquered France, had turned his policy of blood and iron upon the international. Ostrynsky himself had twice been in jail, but he had been young then and had not cared. He had had more of a 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, everyone had laughed at the mere idea of socialism then. In America, all men were freed, as if political liberty made wage slavery any of the more tolerable, Serostrynsky. 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 awaken those in the next room. To Yurgis, 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 working men, that all this wonderful machinery of progress had been created by his fellows Yurgis could not believe it. It seemed too good to be true. That was always the way Serostrynsky. 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 Yurgis would have plenty of chance to vent his excitement, for a presidential campaign was on, and everybody was talking politics. Ostrynsky 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 anyone 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 Ostrynsky 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, Serostrynsky, 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 cabinet, 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, Ostrynsky 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, Björgäs 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, Björgäs had been wandering 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 mountaintop, from which he could survey it all, could see the past 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 packing-town experiences, for instance. What was there about packing- town that Ostrynski could not explain? To Björgäs, the packers had been equivalent to faith. Ostrynski 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. Björgäs recollected how, when he had first come to packing-town, 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 working man, 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 packing- town. 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 Jörges 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 hoops. It was the great butcher. It was the spirit of capitalism made flesh. Upon the ocean of commerce it sailed as a private 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 Yorgos lay down upon the floor of Ostrinzi'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. End of Chapter 29, Recording by Tom Weiss Chapter 30 of The Jungle This Lieberbach's recording is in the public domain. Recording by Tom Weiss The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Chapter 30 Yorgos had breakfast with Ostrinzi and his family, and then he went home to Elzbeta. 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 Elzbeta 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. Yorgos was destined to find that Elzbeta'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 reign to convince her of anything. A wonderfully wise little woman was Elzbeta. She could think as quickly as a haunted rabbit, and in half an hour she had chosen her life attitude to the socialist movement. She agreed in everything with Yorgos 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, Yorgos 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 Yorgos, 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 eyeing him narrowly. Do you drink? he asked. No, sir, said Yorgos. Well, I've been employing a man as a quarter, 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 spatoons 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 Yorgos fell to work and toiled like a trojan till night. Then he went and told Elzbete, and also, late as it was, he paid a visit to Ostrinsky and let him know of his good fortune. Here he received a great surprise, for when he was describing the location of the hotel Ostrinsky interrupted suddenly. Not Heinz. Yes, said Yorgos, that's the name. To which the other replied, then you 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, Yorgos went to his employer and told him, and the man seized him by the hand and shook it. By Joe, he cried, that lets me out. I didn't sleep all last night because I had discharged a good socialist. So after that, Yorgos was known to his boss as Kamrad Yorgos, and in return he was expected to call him Kamrad Heinz. Tommy Heinz, 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 Heinz 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. He had one unfailing remedy for all the evils of this world, and he preached it to everyone. 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 Hines 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 Hines had put all his savings into Chicago real estate and set out a single habit to damn 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 brightonite, 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 hotelkeeper's convention, or an Afro-American businessman's banquet, or a Bible society picnic, Tommy Hines 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. Hines Hotel was a very hotbed 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 someone in the lobby, and as the conversation grew animated, others would gather about to listen, until finally everyone in the place would be crowded into a group, and a regular debate would be underway. This went on every night. When Tommy Hines was not there to do it, his clerk did it, and when his clerk was away campaigning, the assistant attended to it, while Mrs. Hines sat behind the desk, and did the work. The clerk was an old crony of the proprietors, an awkward raw-boned 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 farmer's alliance man, a middle-of-the-road populist. Finally, Tommy Hines had revealed to him the wonderful idea of using the truss instead of destroying them, and he had sold his farm and come to Chicago. That was Amos Struber, and then there was Harry Adams, the assistant clerk of pale, scholarly-looking man who came from Massachusetts of Pilgrim's 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 percent, while in South Carolina it is thirteen and six-tenths percent. 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 least 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 backyard, as he called it. He had no money for car fare, 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 order, 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 Hines, 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 Jurgus' 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 Jurgus would drop his work, whatever it was, and would come, and the other would say, come ride Jurgus, just tell these gentlemen what you saw on the killing beds. At first this request caused poor Jurgus 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 peace with enthusiasm. His employer would sit mine and encourage him with exclamations and shakes of the head, when Jurgus 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 Hines 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 socialist 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 Hines had a knockout blow already. 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 clamoring up 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 Hines 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 Yurgis 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 Hines, and to keep Hine'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, Yurgis 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 Yurgis 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 a 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 anyone who refused to receive the new gospel was personally responsible for keeping Yurgis from his heart's desire, and this alas made him uncomfortable as an acquaintance. He met some neighbors with whom Elzbeta 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 Yurgis. 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 everyone 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, where anxious list 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 the 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 magnet 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 yours could bear. Yet there was no way to 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 Jörges acquired the reading habit he would carry in his pocket a tract or a pamphlet which someone 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 Hines was a sharp little Irishman who knew everything that Jörges 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 Jörges would attend the socialist meetings. During the campaign one was not dependent upon the street corner of fairs, where the weather and the quality of the order was 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 Jörges 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 into making of his head that there had not been enough to complete his legs, but he got about on a 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 a 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 as 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 anyone 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 predatious. 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 exorable, 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 Jörges 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, lies 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 for much speaking, but the great auditorium was as still as death, and everyone heard him. And then, as Jurius came out from this meeting, someone 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 dom, besides 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 red-headed girl, the bulldog, the office goat, and the one-horse. But sometimes again, the appeal would be desperately serious. It sent a correspondent to Calderado 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 Yorgos was a manifesto addressed to striking working men, of which nearly a million copies had been distributed in the industrial centers, wherever the employer's 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 packing-town locals would get armfuls and distribute them on the streets and in the houses. The people of packing-town 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. Yorgos 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 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 packing-town. 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 working men, 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 fuselad of questions for about an hour, and then went home in disgust, and the balance of the meeting was a strictly party affair. Eurigus, 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 gout 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 Eurigus shouting furiously. It's a lie, it's a lie, after which he went on to tell them how he knew it, and that he knew it because he had bought them himself. And he would have told the Pitchfork senator all his experience, had not Harry Adams and a friend grabbed him about the neck and shoved him into a seat. End of chapter 30 Recording by Tom Weiss