The Jungle (Audiobook) | Industrial America, Poverty & Social Justice | Upton Sinclair Part 3

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Chapter 29 of the Jungle.

This lever box 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

in Yorges 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.

Yorges 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 rocking 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 thralldom 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 Yorugas sat back.

The chairman of the meeting came forward

and began to speak.

His voice sounded thin and futile after the others

and to Yorugas it seemed a propination.

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.

Yorugas heard that 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 Yorugas 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.

Yorugas 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 Yorugas 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 smelled bad

and had no place to sleep that night.

And so at last when the meeting broke up

and the audience started to leave,

poor Yorugas 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 staged door

that stood open with people passing in and out

and no one on guard.

Yorugas 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 saw.

The order sat in a chair with his shoulders sunk together

and his eyes half closed.

His face was ghastly pale, almost greenish and hue.

And one arm lay limp at his side.

A big man was 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 Yorugas stood watching while five or 10 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 Yorugas.

There seemed to be a slight hint of inquiry about it

and a sudden impulse seized the other.

He stepped forward.

I wanted to thank you, sir.

He began in breakfast haste.

I could not go away without telling you how much.

How glad I am, I heard you.

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 into Yorugas face.

You want to know more about socialism?

He asked.

Yorugas 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?

Ask the other.

I have no home, said Yorugas.

I am out of work.

You are a partner.

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 Yorugas again.

He had deep black eyes and a face full of gentleness and pain.

You must excuse me, comrade, he said.

I am just tired out.

I have spoken every day for the last month.

I will introduce you to 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 Yorugas as comrade Ostrinsky.

Comrade Ostrinsky was a little man, scarcely up to Yorugas' shoulder, whizzened 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 hand-clasp was hearty and he spoke in Lithuanian, which warmed Yorugas 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 Yorugas bade 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 others' 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 Yorugas' arm tightly.

You have been through the mill comrade, he said, we will make a fighter out of you.

Then Ostrinsky in turn explained his circumstances.

He would have asked Yorugas 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 Yorugas would have to sleep in the hallway,

he offered him his kitchen floor, a chance which the other was only too glad to accept.

Perhaps tomorrow we can do better, set Ostrinsky.

We try 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 Yorugas 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 dance 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.

That 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 Yorugas wanted to understand what socialism

was, it was there he had best began.

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.

So 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.

The Strinsky 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 6 to 1,000 members, and there were 1,400 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 a Strinsky first came to Chicago.

A Strinsky was a poll, 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.

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on.

Ostrinsky 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, or 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 free.

As if political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable, set of Strinsky.

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

out upon the empty stove, and speaking in low whispers so as not to waken those in

the next room.

To Yurugus he seemed a scarcely less wonderful person than the speaker at the meeting.

He was poor, the lowest of the low, hunger driven, admissible, 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, Yurugus could

not believe it, it seemed too good to be true.

That was always the way, set of Strinsky.

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 Yurugus would have plenty of chance to vent his excitement, for a presidential

campaign was on, and everybody was talking politics.

The Strinsky would take him to the next meeting of the branch local, and introduce him,

and he might join the party.

The do's 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 Ostrinsky 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, Serostrinsky, the greatest the world had ever known.

It numbered thirty million of adherence, 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, Ostrinsky 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, Rodriguez sat lost in the conversation of his new acquaintance.

It was the 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, Rodriguez 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 mountain top, from which he could survey at all, could see the past from

which he had wondered, the morasses into which he had stumbled, the hiding places of the

beast of prey that had fallen upon him.

There were his packing-town experiences, for instance.

What was there about packing-town that Ostrinsky could not explain?

To Rodriguez, the packers had been equivalent to faith.

Ostrinsky 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 praying upon the people.

Rodriguez 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.

Rodriguez 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 Rodriguez had made himself familiar with the socialist literature, as he would very

quickly, he would get glimpses of the beef trust from all sorts of aspects, and he would

find it everywhere the same.

It was the incarnation of blind and insensate greed.

It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs.

It was the great butcher.

It was the spirit of capitalism made flesh.

Upon the ocean of commerce it sailed as a private ship.

It had hoisted the black flag and declared war upon civilization.

There in 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 Yorgus lay down upon the floor of a Strinsky's kitchen

and yet it was an hour before he could get to sleep.

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 Liebervox recording is in the public domain, recording by Tom Weiss.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, chapter 30.

Yorgus had breakfast with Ostrinsky and his family, and then he went home to Ellsbyta.

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 Ellsbyta 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.

Then however, she had satisfied herself that he was sane upon all subjects except politics.

She troubled herself no further about it.

Yorgus was destined to find that Ellsbyta'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.

An idea 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 fun, she

gave him full-rained adventure of anything.

A wonderfully wise little woman was Ellsbyta.

She could think as quickly as a hunted rabbit, and in half an hour she had chosen her life

attitude to the socialist movement.

She agreed in everything with Yorgus, 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 Yorgus 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 Yorgus 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 Yorgus.

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

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

Would you be a porter?

Yes sir.

It's hard work, you'll have to clean floors and wash spittoons, and fill lamps and

handle trunks.

I'm willing sir.

All right, I'll pay you thirty a month and board, and you can begin now if you feel

like it.

You can put on the other fellow's rig.

And so Yorgus fell to work, and toiled like a troj until night.

Then he went and told us beta, and also, late as it was, he paid a visit to a Strinsky

and let him know of his good fortune.

Here he received the great surprise, for when he was describing the location of the hotel

of Strinsky interrupted suddenly.

Not Hines.

Yes, said Yorgus, 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 Yorgus went to his employer and told him, and the man seized him by the

hand and shook him, 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 Yorgus was known to his boss as Comrade Yorgus, and in return he was expected

to call him Comrade Hines.

Tommy Hines, 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 Hines 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, in Khrase La Fomme.

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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

trialsome 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 single-handedly

to dam the river of graft.

He had been a reform member of the city council.

He had been a greenbacker, a labor unionist, a populist, a brianite, 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 GAR reunion or a hotel keeper's convention, or an Afro-American businessmen'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.

In total 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 at old crony of the proprietors, an awkward, raw-boned giant of a man, with

a lean, salo face, a broad mouth, and whiskers under his chin, the very tight 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 trusts instead

of destroying them, and he had sold his farm and come to Chicago.

That was Amos Struver, and then there was Harry Adams, the assistant clerk, a pale, scholarly

looking man who came from Massachusetts of Pilgrim'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.

Although 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 notice, 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.

Though 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 the 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 neat 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 Yoruga's story, and after that he would

not have let his new quarter go for the world.

He 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 seeing every bit of it.

And then Yoruga would drop his work, whatever it was, and would come, and the other would

say, come rad Yoruga's, just tell these gentlemen what you saw on the killing beds.

At first this request caused poor Yoruga's the most acute agony, and it was like pulling

teeth to get him to talk.

And gradually he found out what was wanted, and in the end he'd learned to stand up,

and speak his peace with enthusiasm.

His employer would sit my and encourage him with exclamation and shakes of the head.

When Yoruga's would give the formula, propotted 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.

Make 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 trust that I have named our railroad trust, save

only the beef trust.

The beef trust has defined 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 dreamed 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.

Watch was the new home in which Yorugas 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 Hines' 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, Yorugas scrubbed the split tombs 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 Yorugas when the visions 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 Yorugas from his heart's desire, and

this alas made him uncomfortable as an acquaintance.

He met some neighbors with whom El's beta 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 also painfully obvious to Yorugas.

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

There 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 a machine, and come back at night too tired to take his clothes off.

Who had never had a week's vacation in his life, had never traveled, never had an adventure,

never learned anything, never hoped anything.

And when you started to tell him about socialism, he would sniff and say, I'm not interested

in that, I'm an individualist.

And then he would go on to tell you that socialism was paternalism, and that if it ever had

its way the world would stop progressing.

It was enough to make a mule laugh to hear arguments like that.

And yet it was no laughing matter, as you found out, for how many millions of such poor

deluded wretches there were, whose lives had been so stunted by capitalism that they no

longer knew what freedom was.

And they really thought that it was individualism for tens of thousands of them to herd together

and obey the orders of a steel 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 Julius 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.

Rodriguez 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

flood 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 quarters at Heinz was a sharp little Irishman who knew everything that

Rodriguez 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, Rodriguez would attend the socialist meetings.

During the campaign one was not dependent upon the street corner affairs, where the weather

and the quality of the 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

Rodriguez was the impossibility of carrying off but a small part of the treasures they

offered him.

There was a man who was known in the party as the little giant.

The Lord had used up so much material in the making of his head that there had not been

enough to complete his legs, but he got about on 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 the country and

been sent to jail, had lived in the White Chapel 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 prudacious.

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 exhorable, 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 Yorgas heard

the two standard bearers of his party.

Ten years before there had been in Chicago a strike of 150,000 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 a 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 man who had leaned in it, and the tears of suffering little children

pleaded in his voice.

When he spoke, he paced the stage, lied, and eager like a panther.

He leaned over, reaching out for his audience.

He coined it 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 Yoderus 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.

This 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 head-coodle establishment of a society-dom, besides the fate of Mrs. Murphy of San Francisco,

who had starved 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 party I'd 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, or 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 Eich, the bald-headed

man, the red-headed girl, the bulldog, the offoscope,

and the one-hoss.

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 Yorgas was a manifesto addressed to striking working men, of which

nearly a million copies had been distributed in the industrial centers, wherever the

employers associations had been carrying out their open shop program.

You have lost the strike that 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.

In 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.

Yorgas had resolved not to go near his old home again, but when he heard of this, it

was too much for him, and every night for a week he would get on the car and ride out

to the stockyards and help to undo his work of the previous year, when he had sent Mike

Skully's ten pin-setter to the city board of Alderman.

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 Skully and the

Cook County machine were at their wit's end for an issue.

At the very close of the campaign, they be thought themselves of the fact that the strike

had been broken by Negroes, and so they sent for a South Carolina fire-eater.

The pitchfork's 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's senator stood their fuselage of questions for about an hour, and then went

home in disgust, and the balance of the meeting was a strictly party affair.

The strategist 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 gouted 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 the strategist

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's 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.

Chapter 31 of the Jungle.

This Liebervox recording is in the public domain, recording by Tom Weiss.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, Chapter 31.

One of the first things that Yorugas had done after he got a job was to go and see Maria.

She came down into the basement of the house to meet him, and he stood by the door with

his hat in his hand saying, I've got work now, and so you can leave here.

But Maria only shook her head.

There was nothing else for her to do, she said, and nobody to employ her.

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

There were thousands of men who came to this place, and sooner or later she would meet

one of them.

And besides Maria added, I can't do anything, I'm no good, I take dope.

What could you do with me?

Can't you stop, Yorugas cried.

No, she answered, I'll never stop.

What's the use of talking about it, I'll stay here till I die, I guess.

It's all I'm fit for.

And that was all that he could get her to say, there was no use trying.

And he told her he would not let Elzbita take her money she answered indifferently.

Then it'll be wasted here, that's all.

Her eyelids looked heavy, and her face was red and swollen.

He saw that he was annoying her, that she only wanted him to go away.

So he went, disappointed and sad.

Poor Yorugas was not very happy in his home life.

Elzbita was sick a good deal now, and the boys were wild and unruly, and very much the

worst for their life upon the streets.

But he stuck by the family nevertheless, for they reminded him of his old happiness.

And when things went wrong, he could soulish himself with a plunge into the socialist

movement.

Since his life had been caught up into the current of this great stream, things which had

before been the whole of life to him came to seem relatively slight importance.

His interests were elsewhere, in the world of ideas.

His outward life was commonplace and uninteresting.

He was just a hotel-water, and expected to remain one while he lived.

But meantime, in the realm of thought, his life was a perpetual adventure.

There was so much to know, so many wonders to be discovered.

Never in all his life did Yorugas forget the day before election, when there came a telephone

message from a friend of Harry Adams asking him to bring Yorugas to see him that night.

And Yorugas went and met one of the minds of the movement.

The invitation was from a man named Fisher, a Chicago millionaire who had given up his

life to settlement work, and had a little home in the heart of the city's slums.

He did not belong to the party, but he was in sympathy with it, and he said that he was

to have, as his guest that night, the editor of a big Eastern magazine who wrote against

socialism, but really did not know what it was.

The millionaire suggested that Adams bring Yorugas along, and then start up the subject

of pure food in which the editor was interested.

Young Fisher's home was a little too-story brick house, dingy and weather-beating outside,

but attractive within.

The room that Yorugas saw was half-lined with books, and upon the walls were many pictures

dimly visible in the soft yellow light.

It was a cold rainy night, so a log fire was crackling in the open hearth.

One or eight people were gathered about it when Adams and his friend arrived, and Yorugas

saw to his dismay that three of them were ladies.

He had never talked to people of this sort before, and he fell into an agony of embarrassment.

He stood in the doorway clutching his hat tightly in his hands, and made a deep bow to

each of the persons as he was introduced.

Then, when he was asked to have a seat, he took a chair in a dark corner, and sat down

upon the edge of it, and wiped the perspiration off his far head with his sleeve.

He was terrified, lest they should expect him to talk.

There was the host himself, a tall, athletic young man, clad in evening dress, as also

was the editor, a deceptic-looking gentleman named Maynard.

There was the former's frail, young wife, and also an elderly lady who taught kindergarten

in the settlement, and a young college student, a beautiful girl with an intense and earnest

face.

She only spoke once or twice while Yorugas was there.

The rest of the time she sat by the table in the center of the room, resting her chin

in her hands, and drinking in the conversation.

There were two other men whom young Fisher had introduced to Yorugas as Mr. Lucas and

Mr. Schlimen.

He heard them address Adams as Comrad, and so he knew that they were socialists.

The one called Lucas was a mild and meek-looking little gentleman of clerical aspect.

He had been an itinerant evangelist, it transpired, and had seen the light and become a profit

of the new dispensation.

He traveled all over the country, living like the apostles of old upon hospitality, and

preaching upon street corners when there was no hall.

The other man had been in the midst of a discussion with the editor when Adams and Yorugas came

in, and at the suggestion of the host they resumed it after the interruption.

Yorugas was soon sitting spellbound, thinking that here was surely the strangest man that

had ever lived in the world.

Nicholas Schlimen was a swede, a tall, gaunt person with hairy hands and bristling yellow

beard.

He was a university man, and had been a professor of philosophy, until, as he said, he had found

that he was selling his character as well as his time.

Instead, he had come to America, where he lived in a garret room in this slum district,

and made volcanic energy take the place of fire.

He studied the composition of foodstuffs, and knew exactly how many proteeds and carbohydrates

his body needed.

And by scientific chewing, he said that he tripled the value of all he ate, so that it

cost him eleven cents a day.

About the 1st of July, he would leave Chicago for his vacation, on foot, and when he struck

the harvest fields, he would set to work for two dollars and a half a day, and come home

when he had another year's supply, a hundred and twenty-five dollars.

That was the nearest approach to independence a man could make, under capitalism, he explained.

He would never marry, for no sane man would allow himself to fall in love, until after

the revolution.

He sat in a big armchair with his legs crossed, and his head so far in the shadow that one

saw only two glowing lights reflected from the fire on the hearth.

He spoke simply and utterly without emotion.

With the manner of a teacher setting forth to a group of scholars and axiom in geometry,

he would enunciate such propositions as made the hair of an ordinary person rise on end.

And when the auditor had asserted his non-comprehension, he would proceed to elucidate by some new

proposition, yet more appalling.

To Yurukas, the hair of Dr. Schleeman assumed the proportions of a thunderstorm or an earthquake,

and yet, strange as it might seem, there was a subtle bond between them, and he could

follow the argument nearly all the time.

He was carried over the difficult places in spite of himself, and he went plunging away

in mad career, a very maceparide upon the wild horse speculation.

Nicholas Schleeman was familiar with all the universe, and with man as a small part of

it.

He understood human institutions, and blew them about like soap bubbles.

It was surprising that so much destructiveness could be contained in one human mind.

Was it government?

The purpose of government was the guarding of property rights, the perpetuation of

ancient force and modern fraud, or was it marriage?

Marriage and prostitution were two sides of one shield, the predatory man's exploitation

of the sex pleasure.

The difference between them was a difference of class.

If a woman had money, she might dictate her own terms, equality, a life contract, and

the legitimacy, that is, the property rights of her children.

If she had no money, she was a proletarian and sold herself for an existence.

And then the subject became religion, which was the archfiend's deadliest weapon.

Government oppressed the body of the wage slave, but religion oppressed his mind and poisoned

the stream of progress at its source.

The working man was to fix his hopes upon a future life, while his pockets were picked

in this one.

He was brought up to the frugality, humility, obedience, in short to all the pseudo virtues

of capitalism.

The destiny of civilization would be decided in one final death struggle between the red

international and the black, between socialism and the Roman Catholic Church.

While here at home the Stygian Midnight of American Evangelicalism.

And here the preacher entered the field, and there was a lively tussle.

Comrade Lucas was not what is called an educated man.

He knew only the Bible, but it was the Bible interpreted by real experience.

And what was the use he asked of confusing religion with men's perversions of it?

But the church was in the hands of the merchants at the moment was obvious enough.

But already there were signs of rebellion, and if Comrade Schleeman could come back

a few years from now.

I, yes, said the other.

Of course, I have no doubt that in a hundred years the Vatican will be denying that it ever

opposed socialism, just as at present it denies that it ever tortured Galileo.

I am not defending the Vatican, exclaimed Lucas vehemently.

I am defending the Word of God, which is one long cry of the human spirit for deliverance

from the sway of oppression.

Take the twenty-fourth chapter of the book of Job, which I am accustomed to quote in my

addresses as the Bible upon the beef trust, or take the words of Isaiah, or of the master

himself.

Not the elegant prince of our debauched and vicious art, not the jeweled idol of our society

churches, but the Jesus of the awful reality, the man of sorrow and pain, the outcasts, despised

of the world, who had nowhere to lay his head.

I will grant you Jesus, interrupted the other, well then, cried Lucas, and why should Jesus

have nothing to do with his church?

Why should his words and his life be of no authority among those who profess to adore

him?

There is a man who was the world's first revolutionist.

The true founder of the socialist movement, a man whose whole being was one flame of hatred

for wealth, and all that wealth stands for, for the pride of wealth, and the luxury of

wealth, and the tyranny of wealth, who was himself a beggar and a tramp, a man of the

people, an associate of saloonkeepers and women of the town, who again and again in the

most explicit language denounced wealth and the holding of wealth, lay not up for yourselves

treasures on earth.

Sell that ye have and give arms, blessed are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.

Woe unto you that are rich, for ye shall have received your consolation.

Verily, I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven,

who denounced in unmeasured terms the exploiters of his own time.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.

Woe unto you also, you lawyers, ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape

the damnation of hell, who drove out the businessman and brokers from the temple with a whip?

Who was crucified?

Think of it, for an incendiary and a disturbor of the social order.

And this man, they have made into the high priest of property and smug respectability,

a divine sanction of all the horrors and abominations of modern commercial civilization.

Jeweled images are made of him, sensual priests burn incense to him, and modern pirates

of industry bring their dollars run from the toil of helpless women and children, and

build temples to him, and sit in cushion seats and listen to his teachings expounded by

doctors of dusty divinity.

Bravo, cried Schleeman laughing.

But the other was in full career.

He had talked this subject every day for five years and had never yet let himself be stopped.

This Jesus of Nazareth, he cried.

This class-conscious working man, this union carpenter, this agitator, law-breaker, fire-brand,

anarchist.

He, the sovereign lord and master of a world which grinds the bodies and souls of human

beings into dollars, if he could come into the world this day and see the things that

man 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 him to do wholesale murder

for the benefit of foul monsters of sensuality and cruelty?

Do you not know that if he were in St. Petersburg now, he would take the whip with which he drove

out the bankers from his temple?

Here the speaker paused for an instant for breath.

No comrade, said the other dryly, or he was a practical man.

He would take pretty little imitation lemons such as are now being shipped into Russia,

handy for carrying in the pockets and strong enough to blow a whole temple out of sight.

Lucas waited until the company had stopped laughing over this, then he began again.

But look at it from the point of view of practical politics comrade.

Here is an historical figure whom all men reverence and love, who some regard as divine,

and who was one of us who lived our life and taught our doctrine.

And now shall we leave him in the hands of his enemies?

Shall we allow them to stifle and stultify his example?

We have his words which no one can deny, and shall we not quote them to the people and

prove to them what he was, and what he taught, and what he did?

No, no, a thousand times no.

We shall use his authority to turn out the naves and sluggards from his ministry, and we

shall yet rouse the people to action.

Lucas halted again, and the others stretched out his hand to a paper on the table.

Here comrade, he said with a laugh.

Here is a place for you to begin.

A bishop whose wife has just been robbed of fifty thousand dollars worth of diamonds,

and a most unctuous and oily of bishops, an eminent and scholarly bishop, a philanthropist

and friend of labor bishop, a civic federation decoyed up for the chloroforming of the wage

working man, to this little passage of arms the rest of the company sat as spectators.

But now, Mr. Maynard, the editor, took occasion to remark, somewhat naively, that he had always

understood that socialist had a cut and dried program for the future of civilization, whereas

here were two active members of the party who, from what he could make out, were agreed

about nothing at all.

Would the two, for his enlightenment, try to ascertain just what they had in common, and

why they belonged to the same party?

This resulted after much debating in the formulating of two carefully worded propositions.

First, that a socialist believes in the common ownership and democratic management of the

means of producing the necessities of life.

And second, that a socialist believes that the means by which this is to be brought about

is the class conscious political organizations of the wage earners.

As far they were at one, but no farther.

To Lucas, the religious zealot, the cooperative commonwealth was the new Jerusalem, the kingdom

of heaven, which is within you.

To the other, socialism was simply a necessary step toward a far distant goal, a step to be

tolerated within patience.

Schlimen called himself a philosophic anarchist, and he explained that an anarchist was one who

believed that the end of human existence was the free development of every personality,

unrestricted by laws saved those of its own being.

Since the same kind of match would light everyone's fire, and the same shaped look of bread

would fill everyone's stomach, it would be perfectly feasible to submit industry to the

control of a majority vote.

There was only one earth, and the quantity of material things was limited.

Of intellectual and moral things, on the other hand, there was no limit, and one could

have more without another's having less.

Hence communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual was the formula of modern

proletarian thought.

As soon as the birth agony was over, and the wounds of society had been healed, there

would be established a simple system whereby each man was credited with his labor and

dividend with his purchases.

And after that, the process as a production, exchange, and consumption would go on automatically,

and without our being conscious of them, any more than a man is conscious of the beating

of his heart.

And then explain to Schlimen, society would break up into independent self-governing communities

of mutually congenial persons, examples of which at present were clubs, churches, and

political parties.

After the revolution, all the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual activities of men

would be cared for by such free associations.

Romantic novelists would be supported by those who like to read romantic novels, and impressionist

painters would be supported by those who like to look at impressionist pictures, and

the same with creatures and scientists, editors and actors and musicians.

If anyone wanted to work or paint or pray, and could find no one to maintain him, he

could support himself by working part of the time.

That was the case at present, the only difference being that the competitive wage system compelled

a man to work all the time to live, while after the abolition of privilege and exploitation

anyone would be able to support himself by an hour's work a day.

Although the artist audience of the present was a small minority of people, all debased

and vulgarized by the effort it had cost them to win in the commercial battle of the intellectual

and artistic activities which would result when the whole of mankind was set free from

the nightmare of competition, we could at present form no conception, whatever.

And then the editor wanted to know upon what ground Dr. Schlimen asserted that it might

be possible for a society to exist upon an hour's toil by each of its members.

Just what answered the other would be the productive capacity of society, if the present

resources of science were utilized, we have no means of ascertaining.

But we may be sure it would exceed anything that would sound reasonable to minds inured

to the ferocious barbarities of capitalism.

Under the triumph of the international proletariat, war would of course become inconceivable.

And who can figure the cost of war to humanity?

Not merely the value of the lives and the material that it destroys, not merely the cost of

keeping millions of men in idleness, of arming and equipping them for battle and parade,

but the drain upon the vital energies of society by the war attitude and the war terror,

the brutality and ignorance, the drunkenness, prostitution, and crime it entails, the industrial

impotence and the moral deadness.

Do you think that it would be too much to say that two hours of the working time of every

efficient member of a community goes to feed the red-fiend of war?

And then Schlimen went on to outline some of the wastes of competition, the losses of

industrial warfare, the ceaseless worry and friction, the vices such as drink for instance,

the use of which had nearly doubled in twenty years as a consequence of the intensification

of the economic struggle, the idle and unproductive members of the community, the frivolous rich

and the popularized poor, the law and the whole machinery of repression, the waste of social

ostentation, the milleners and tailors, the hairdressers, dancing masters, chefs and

lackeys.

You understand, he said, that in a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition,

money is necessarily the test of prowness and wasfulness the sole criterion of power.

So we have, at the present moment, a society with, say, thirty percent of the population

occupied in producing useless articles, and one percent occupied in destroying them.

And this is not all.

For the servants and pandeurs of the parasites are also parasites, the milleners and the

jewelers and the lackeys have also to be supported by the useful members of the community.

And bear in mind also that this monstrous disease affects not merely the eyelers and

their menials, its poison penetrates the whole social body.

Beneath the hundred thousand women of the elite are a million middle-class women, miserable

because they are not of the elite, and trying to appear of it in public.

And beneath them, in turn, are five million farmers-wise, reading fashion papers and trimming

bonnets and shopgirls and serving maids, selling themselves into brothels for cheap jewelry

and imitations seal skin robes.

And then consider that added to this competition in display you have, like oil on the flames,

a whole system of competition in selling.

You have manufacturers contriving tens of thousands of catch-penny devices, storekeepers

displaying them, and newspapers and magazines filled up with advertisements of them.

And don't forget the waste of fraud put in young fishermen.

When one comes to the ultra-modern profession of advertising, Responditch Lehman, the science

of persuading people to buy what they do not want.

He is in the very center of the ghastly-charnel house of capitalist destructiveness, and he scarcely

knows which of a dozen horrors to point out first.

But consider the waste in time and energy incidental to making 10,000 varieties of a thing

for purposes of ostentation and snobbishness, where one variety would do for use.

Consider all the waste incidental to the manufacture of cheap qualities of goods.

Of goods made to sell and deceive the ignorant.

Consider the waste of adulteration, the shotty clothing, the cotton blankets, the unstable

ornaments, the ground-court life-preservers, the adulterated milk, the analene soda water,

the potato flower sausages, and consider the moral aspects of the thing put in the ex-creature.

Precisely, said Schleeman, the low-nabory and the ferocious cruelty incidental to them,

the plotting and the lying and the bribing, the blustering and bragging, the screaming

egotism, the hurrying and worrying.

Of course, imitation and adulteration are the essence of competition.

They are, but another form of the phrase, to buy in the cheapest market and sell in

the dearest.

A government official has stated that the nation suffers a loss of a billion and a quarter

dollars a year through adulterated foods, which means, of course, not only materials wasted

that might have been useful outside of the human stomach, but doctors and nurses for

people who would otherwise have been well, and undertakers for the whole human race ten

or twenty years before the proper time.

Then again, consider the waste of time and energy required to sell these things in a dozen

stores, where one would do.

There are a million or two of business firms in the country, and five or ten times as

many clerks, and consider the handling and rehandling, the accounting and re-accounting,

the planning and worrying, the balancing of petty profit and loss.

Consider the whole machinery of the civil law made necessary by these processes.

The libraries of ponderous tomes, the courts and juries to interpret them, the lawyers

studying to circumvent them, the petty fogging and chicaneery, the hatreds and lies.

Consider the waste incidental to the blind and haphazard production of commodities, the

factories closed, the workers idle, the goods spoiling in storage.

Consider the activities of the stock manipulator, the paralyzing of whole industries, the over-stimulation

of others for speculative purposes.

The assignments and bank failures, the crises and panics, the deserted towns and the starving

populations.

Consider the energies wasted in the seeking of markets, the sterile trades, such as drummer,

solicitor, bill-poster, advertising agent.

Consider the waste incidental to the crowding in the cities made necessary by competition

and by monopoly railroad rates.

Consider the slums, the bad hair.

The disease and the waste of vital energies.

Consider the office buildings, the waste of time and material in the piling of story upon

story and the burrowing underground.

Then take the whole business of insurance, the enormous mass of administrative and clerical

labor it involves, and all utter waste.

I do not follow that," said the editor.

The cooperative Commonwealth is a universal automatic insurance company and savings bank

for all its members.

Capital, being the property of all, injury to it is shared by all and made up by all.

The bank is the universal government credit account, the ledger in which every individual's

earnings and spendings are balanced.

There is also a universal government bulletin, in which are listed and precisely described

everything which the Commonwealth has for sale.

As no one makes any profit by the sale, there is no longer any stimulus to extravagance

and no misrepresentation, no cheating, no adulteration or imitation, no bribery or grafting.

How is the price of an article determined?

The price is the labor it has cost to make and deliver it, and it is determined by the

first principles of arithmetic.

The million workers in the nation's wheat fields have worked a hundred days each, and

the total product of the labor is a billion bushels, so the value of a bushel of wheat

is the tenth part of a farm labor day.

If we employ an arbitrary symbol and pay, say, five dollars a day per farm work, then the

cost of a bushel of wheat is fifty cents.

You say per farm work, said Mr. Maynard.

Then labor is not to be paid alike, manifestly not, since some work is easy and some hard,

and we should have millions of rural male carriers and no coal miners.

Of course, the wages may be left the same and the hours varied.

One or the other will have to be varied continually, according as a greater or less number of

workers is needed in any particular industry.

That is precisely what is done if present, except that the transfer of the workers is accomplished

blindly and imperfectly, by rumors and advertisements, instead of instantly and completely

by a universal government bulletin.

How about those occupations in which time is difficult to calculate?

What is the labor cost of a book?

Obviously, it is the labor cost of the paper, printing, and binding of it, about a fifth

of its present cost.

And the author?

I have already said that the state could not control intellectual production.

The state might say that it had taken a year to write the book, and the author might say

it had taken thirty.

Kerta said that every one lot of his had cost a purse of gold.

What I outline here is a national, or rather, international system for the providing of

the material needs of men.

Since a man has intellectual needs also, he will work longer, earn more, and provide

for them to his own taste and in his own way.

I live on the same earth as the majority, I wear the same kind of shoes, and sleep in

the same kind of bed, but I do not think the same kind of thoughts, and I do not wish

to pay for such thinkers as the majority selects.

I wish such things to be left to free effort, as at present.

If people want to listen to a certain preacher, they get together and contribute what they

please, and pay for a church, and support the preacher, and then listen to him.

I, who do not want to listen to him, stay away, and it costs me nothing.

In the same way, there are magazines about Egyptian coins and Catholic saints, and flying

machines and athletic records, and I know nothing about any of them.

On the other hand, if wage slavery were abolished, and I could earn some spare money without

paying tribute to an exploiting capitalist, then there would be a magazine for the purpose

of interpreting and popularizing the gospel of Friedrich Nietzsche, the prophet of evolution,

and also of Horus Fletcher, the inventor of the noble science of clean eating.

And incidentally, perhaps for the discouraging of long skirts, and the scientific breeding

of men and women, and the establishing of divorce by mutual consent.

Dr. Schleeman paused for a moment.

That was a lecture, he said, with a laugh.

And yet, I am only begun.

What else is there, asked Mayer?

I have pointed out some of the negative ways of competition answered the other.

I have hardly mentioned the positive economies of cooperation.

Allowing fine to a family, there are 15 million families in this country, and at least

10 million of these live separately, the domestic drudge being either the wife or a wage slave.

Now set aside the modern system of pneumatic house cleaning, and the economies a cooperative

cooking, and consider one single item, the washing of dishes.

Surely, it is moderate to say that the dish washing for a family of five takes half an

hour a day.

With ten hours as a day's work, it takes therefore half a million able-bodied persons, mostly

women, to do the dish washing of the country.

And note that this is a most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work.

That it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill temper, of prostitution, suicide,

and insanity, of drunken husbands and degenerate children, for all of which things the community

has naturally to pay.

And now consider that in each of my little, free communities, there would be a machine

which would wash and dry the dishes, and do it not merely to the eye and the touch, but

scientifically, sterilizing them, and do it at a saving of all the drudgery and nine

tenths of the time.

All of these things you may find in the books of Mrs. Gilman, and then take Copacan's

fields, factories, and workshops, and read about the new science of agriculture, which

has been built up in the last ten years, by which, with made soils and intensive culture,

a gardener can raise ten or twelve crops in a season, and two hundred tons of vegetables

upon a single acre, by which the population of the whole globe could be supported on

the soil now cultivated in the United States alone.

It is impossible to apply such methods now owing to the ignorance and poverty of our

scattered farming population, but imagine the problem of providing the food supply of

our nation once taken in hand systematically and rationally by scientists.

All the poor and rocky land set apart for a national timber reserve, in which our children

play, and our young men hunt, and our poets dwell.

The most favorable climate and soil for each product selected, the exact requirements

of the community known, and the acreage figured accordingly.

The most improved machinery employed under the direction of expert agricultural chemists.

I was brought up on a farm, and I know the awful deadliness of farm work, and I like to

picture it all as it will be after the revolution.

To picture the great potato planting machine, drawn by four horses, or an electric motor,

plowing the furl, cutting and dropping and covering the potatoes, and planting a score

of acres a day.

To picture the great potato digging machine run by electricity perhaps, and moving across

a thousand acre field, scooping up earthen potatoes, and dropping the ladder into sacks.

To every other kind of vegetable-improved, handled in the same way, apples and oranges

picked by machinery, cows milked by electricity, things which are already done as you may know.

To picture the harvest fields of the future, to which millions of happy men and women come

for a summer holiday, brought by special trains, the exactly needful number to each place.

To contrast all this, with our present agonizing system of independent, small farming, a stunted

haggard, ignorant man, made it with a yellow lean and said I'd drudge and toiling from

four o'clock in the morning until nine at night, working the children as soon as they

are able to walk, scratching the soil with its primitive tools, and shut out from all

knowledge and hope, from all their benefits of science and invention, and all the joys

of the spirit, held to a bare existence by competition and labor, and boasting of his

freedom because he is too blind to see his chains.

Dr. Schleeman paused for a moment, and then he continued, place beside this fact of an

unlimited food supply, the newest discovery of physiologists that most of the ills of

the human system are due to overfeeding.

And then again, it has been proven that meat is unnecessary as a food, and meat is obviously

more difficult to produce than vegetable food, less pleasant to prepare and handle, and

more likely to be unclean.

But what of that, so long as it tickles the palate more strongly?

How would socialism change that, ask the girl's student quickly?

It was the first time she had spoken.

So long as we have wage slavery, answered Schleeman, it matters not in the least how debasing

and repulsive a task may be.

It is easy to find people to perform it.

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

So one by one, the old dingy and unsanitary factories will come down.

It will be cheaper to build new.

And so the steenships will be provided with stoking machinery.

And so the dangerous trades will be made safe, or substitutes will be found for their products.

In exactly the same way, as the citizens of our industrial republic become refined, year

by year the cost of slaughterhouse products will increase.

Until eventually those who want to eat meat will have to do their own killing.

And how long do you think the custom would survive then?

To go on to another item, one of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy

is political corruption.

And one of the consequences of civic administration by ignorant and vicious politicians is that

preventable diseases kill off half our population.

And even if science were allowed to try, it could do little, because the majority of

human beings are not yet human beings at all.

But simply machines for the creating of wealth for others.

They are penned up and filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery.

And the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world

could heal them.

And so, of course, they remain as centers of contagion, poisoning the lives of all of

us, and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish.

For this reason, I would seriously maintain that all the medical and surgical discoveries

that science can make in the future will be of less importance than the application of

the knowledge we already possess, when the disinherited of the earth have established

their right to a human existence.

And here the hair doctor relapsed into silence again.

Yorugas had noticed that the beautiful young girl who sat by the center table was listening

with something of the same look that he himself had worn the time when he had first discovered

socialism.

Yorugas would have liked to talk to her.

He felt sure that she would have understood him.

Later on in the evening, when the group broke up, he heard Mrs. Fisher say to her in a low

voice.

I wonder if Mr. Maynard will still write the same things about socialism, to which she

answered, I don't know, but if he does, we shall know that he is a maid.

And only a few hours after this came election day.

When the long campaign was over, and the whole country seemed to stand still and hold

its breath, awaiting the issue.

Yorugas and the rest of the staff of Hines Hotel could hardly stop to finish their dinner,

before they hurried off to the big hall, which the party had hired for that evening.

But already there were people waiting, and already the telegraph instrument on the stage

had begun clicking off the returns.

When the final accounts were made up, the socialist vote proved to be over 400,000, an increase

of something like 350% in four years, and that was doing well.

So the party was dependent for its early returns upon messages from the locals, and naturally

those locals which had been most successful were the ones which felt most like reporting.

And so that night everyone in the hall believed that the vote was going to be six or seven

or even eight hundred thousand.

Just such an incredible increase had actually been made in Chicago, and in the state.

The vote of the city had been 6,700 in 1900, and now it was 47,000.

That of Illinois's had been 9,600, and now it was 69,000.

So as the evening waxed and the crowd piled in, the meeting was a sight to be seen.

Bulletin's would be red, and the people would shout themselves horse, and then someone

would make a speech, and there would be more shouting, and then a brief silence and more

bulletins.

There would come messages from the secretaries of neighboring states reporting their achievements.

The vote of Indiana had gone from 2,300 to 12,000, of Wisconsin from 7,000 to 28,000, of

Ohio from 4,800 to 36,000.

There were telegrams to the National Office from enthusiastic individuals in little towns

which had made amazing and unprecedented increases in a single year.

Vanityc Kansas from 26 to 260, Henderson, Kentucky from 19 to 111, Holland, Michigan from 14

to 208, Cleo, Oklahoma from 0 to 104, Martin Spherio, Ohio from 0 to 296, and many more of

the same kind.

There were literally hundreds of such towns.

There would be reports from half a dozen of them in a single batch of telegrams, and

the men who read the dispatches off to the audience were old campaigners who had been

to the places and helped to make the vote, and could make appropriate comments.

Quincy Illinois from 189 to 831, that was where the mayor had arrested a socialist speaker.

Vanityc County, Kansas from 285 to 975, that was the home of the appeal to reason.

Battle Creek, Michigan from 4,261 to 10,184.

That was the answer of labor to the Citizens Alliance movement, and then there were official

returns from the various precincts and wards of the city itself, whether it was a factory

district for one of the silk stocking wards seemed to make no particular difference in

the increase, but one of the things which surprised the party leader's most was the

tremendous vote that came rolling in from the stockyards.

Packing Town comprised three wards of the city, and the vote in the spring of 1903 had

been 500, and in the fall of the same year, 1,600.

And now, only one year later, it was over 6,300, and the Democratic vote only 8,800.

There were other wards in which the Democratic vote had been actually surpassed, and in

two districts members of the state legislature had been elected.

Thus, Chicago now led the country.

It had set a new standard for the party.

It had shown the working men the way.

Those spoke an order upon the platform, and 2,000 pairs of eyes were fixed upon him,

and 2,000 voices were cheering his every sentence.

The order had been the head of the city's relief bureau in the stockyards until the site

of misery and corruption had made him sick.

He was young, hungry looking, full of fire, and as he swung his long arms and beat up

the crown to Yurugas, he seen the very spirit of the revolution.

Organize, organize, organize, that was his cry.

He was afraid of this tremendous vote, which his party had not expected, and which it had

not earned.

These men are not socialists he cried, the election will pass, and the excitement will

die, and people will forget about it.

And if you forget about it too, if you sink back and rest upon your ores, we shall lose

this vote that we have pulled today, and our enemies will laugh us to scorn.

It rests with you to take your resolution, now in the flush of victory, to find these

men who have voted for us, and bring them to our meetings, and organize them, and bind

them to us.

We shall not find all our campaigns as easy as this one.

Everywhere in the country tonight, the old party politicians are studying this vote,

setting their sales by it, and nowhere will they be quicker or more cunning than here in

our own city.

Fifty thousand socialist votes in Chicago means a municipal ownership democracy in the

spring, and then they will fool the voters once more, and all the powers of plunder and

corruption will be swept into office again.

But whatever they may do when they get in, there is one thing they will not do, and that

will be the thing for which they were elected.

They will not give the people of our city unisable ownership, they will not mean to do it,

they will not try to do it, all that they will do is give our party in Chicago the greatest

opportunity that has ever come to socialism in America.

We shall have the sham reformers self-stultified and self-convicted, we shall have the radical

democracy left without a lie with which to cover its nakedness, and then we will begin

the rush that will never be checked.

The tide that will never turn till it has reached its flood, that will be irresistible,

overwhelming, the rallying of the outraged working men of Chicago to our standard.

And we shall organize them, we shall drill them, we shall marshal them for the victory,

we shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep if before us, and Chicago will be ours.

Chicago will be ours, Chicago will be ours.

This is the end of the jungle by Upton Sinclair, recording by Tom Weiss.