CHAPTER 31

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One of the first things that Jurgis had done after he got a job

was to go and see Marija. She came down into the basement of the

house to meet him, and he stood by the door with his hat in his

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

But Marija only shook her head. There was nothing else for her

to do, she said, and nobody to employ her. She could not keep

her past a secret--girls had tried it, and they were always found

out. There were thousands of men who came to this place, and

sooner or later she would meet one of them. "And besides,"

Marija added, "I can't do anything. I'm no good--I take dope.

What could you do with me?"

"Can't you stop?" Jurgis cried.

"No," she answered, "I'll never stop. What's the use of talking

about it--I'll stay here till I die, I guess. It's all I'm fit

for." And that was all that he could get her to say--there was no

use trying. When he told her he would not let Elzbieta take her

money, she answered indifferently: "Then it'll be wasted

here--that's all." Her eyelids looked heavy and her face was red

and swollen; he saw that he was annoying her, that she only

wanted him to go away. So he went, disappointed and sad.

Poor Jurgis was not very happy in his home-life. Elzbieta was

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

much the worse for their life upon the streets. But he stuck by

the family nevertheless, for they reminded him of his old

happiness; and when things went wrong he could solace himself

with a plunge into the Socialist movement. Since his life had

been caught up into the current of this great stream, things

which had before been the whole of life to him came to seem of

relatively slight importance; his interests were elsewhere,

in the world of ideas. His outward life was commonplace and

uninteresting; he was just a hotel-porter, and expected to remain

one while he lived; but meantime, in the realm of thought,

his life was a perpetual adventure. There was so much to know--so

many wonders to be discovered! Never in all his life did Jurgis

forget the day before election, when there came a telephone

message from a friend of Harry Adams, asking him to bring Jurgis

to see him that night; and Jurgis went, and met one of the minds

of the movement.

The invitation was from a man named Fisher, a Chicago millionaire

who had given up his life to settlement work, and had a little

home in the heart of the city's slums. He did not belong to the

party, but he was in sympathy with it; and he said that he was to

have as his guest that night the editor of a big Eastern

magazine, who wrote against Socialism, but really did not know

what it was. The millionaire suggested that Adams bring Jurgis

along, and then start up the subject of "pure food," in which the

editor was interested.

Young Fisher's home was a little two-story brick house, dingy and

weather-beaten outside, but attractive within. The room that

Jurgis saw was half lined with books, and upon the walls were

many pictures, dimly visible in the soft, yellow light; it was a

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

hearth. Seven or eight people were gathered about it when Adams

and his friend arrived, and Jurgis saw to his dismay that three

of them were ladies. He had never talked to people of this sort

before, and he fell into an agony of embarrassment. He stood in

the doorway clutching his hat tightly in his hands, and made a

deep bow to each of the persons as he was introduced; then, when

he was asked to have a seat, he took a chair in a dark corner,

and sat down upon the edge of it, and wiped the perspiration off

his forehead with his sleeve. He was terrified lest they should

expect him to talk.

There was the host himself, a tall, athletic young man, clad in

evening dress, as also was the editor, a dyspeptic-looking

gentleman named Maynard. There was the former's frail young

wife, and also an elderly lady, who taught kindergarten in the

settlement, and a young college student, a beautiful girl with an

intense and earnest face. She only spoke once or twice while

Jurgis was there--the rest of the time she sat by the table in

the center of the room, resting her chin in her hands and

drinking in the conversation. There were two other men, whom

young Fisher had introduced to Jurgis as Mr. Lucas and Mr.

Schliemann; he heard them address Adams as "Comrade," and so he

knew that they were Socialists.

The one called Lucas was a mild and meek-looking little gentleman

of clerical aspect; he had been an itinerant evangelist, it

transpired, and had seen the light and become a prophet of the

new dispensation. He traveled all over the country, living like

the apostles of old, upon hospitality, and preaching upon street-

corners when there was no hall. The other man had been in the

midst of a discussion with the editor when Adams and Jurgis came

in; and at the suggestion of the host they resumed it after the

interruption. Jurgis was soon sitting spellbound, thinking that

here was surely the strangest man that had ever lived in the

world.

Nicholas Schliemann was a Swede, a tall, gaunt person, with hairy

hands and bristling yellow beard; he was a university man, and

had been a professor of philosophy--until, as he said, he had

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

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

in this slum district, and made volcanic energy take the place of

fire. He studied the composition of food-stuffs, and knew

exactly how many proteids and carbohydrates his body needed;

and by scientific chewing he said that he tripled the value

of all he ate, so that it cost him eleven cents a day. About the first of

July he would leave Chicago for his vacation, on foot; and when

he struck the harvest fields he would set to work for two dollars

and a half a day, and come home when he had another year's

supply--a hundred and twenty-five dollars. That was the nearest

approach to independence a man could make "under capitalism," he

explained; he would never marry, for no sane man would allow

himself to fall in love until after the revolution.

He sat in a big arm-chair, with his legs crossed, and his head so

far in the shadow that one saw only two glowing lights, reflected

from the fire on the hearth. He spoke simply, and utterly

without emotion; with the manner of a teacher setting forth to a

group of scholars an axiom in geometry, he would enunciate such

propositions as made the hair of an ordinary person rise on end.

And when the auditor had asserted his non-comprehension, he would

proceed to elucidate by some new proposition, yet more appalling.

To Jurgis the Herr Dr. Schliemann assumed the proportions of a

thunderstorm or an earthquake. And yet, strange as it might

seem, there was a subtle bond between them, and he could follow

the argument nearly all the time. He was carried over the

difficult places in spite of himself; and he went plunging away

in mad career--a very Mazeppa-ride upon the wild horse

Speculation.

Nicholas Schliemann was familiar with all the universe, and with

man as a small part of it. He understood human institutions, and

blew them about like soap bubbles. It was surprising that so

much destructiveness could be contained in one human mind. Was

it government? The purpose of government was the guarding of

property-rights, the perpetuation of ancient force and modern

fraud. Or was it marriage? Marriage and prostitution were two

sides of one shield, the predatory man's exploitation of the sex-

pleasure. The difference between them was a difference of class.

If a woman had money she might dictate her own terms: equality,

a life contract, and the legitimacy--that is, the property-rights--

of her children. If she had no money, she was a proletarian, and

sold herself for an existence. And then the subject became

Religion, which was the Archfiend's deadliest weapon. Government

oppressed the body of the wage-slave, but Religion oppressed his

mind, and poisoned the stream of progress at its source. The

working-man was to fix his hopes upon a future life, while his

pockets were picked in this one; he was brought up to frugality,

humility, obedience--in short to all the pseudo-virtues of

capitalism. The destiny of civilization would be decided in one

final death struggle between the Red International and the Black,

between Socialism and the Roman Catholic Church; while here at

home, "the stygian midnight of American evangelicalism--"

And here the ex-preacher entered the field, and there was a

lively tussle. "Comrade" Lucas was not what is called an

educated man; he knew only the Bible, but it was the Bible

interpreted by real experience. And what was the use, he asked,

of confusing Religion with men's perversions of it? That the

church was in the hands of the merchants at the moment was

obvious enough; but already there were signs of rebellion, and if

Comrade Schliemann could come back a few years from now--

"Ah, yes," said the other, "of course, I have no doubt that in a

hundred years the Vatican will be denying that it ever opposed

Socialism, just as at present it denies that it ever tortured

Galileo."

"I am not defending the Vatican," exclaimed Lucas, vehemently.

"I am defending the word of God--which is one long cry of the

human spirit for deliverance from the sway of oppression. Take

the twenty-fourth chapter of the Book of Job, which I am

accustomed to quote in my addresses as 'the Bible upon the Beef

Trust'; or take the words of Isaiah--or of the Master himself!

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

jeweled idol of our society churches--but the Jesus of the awful

reality, the man of sorrow and pain, the outcast, despised of the

world, who had nowhere to lay his head--"

"I will grant you Jesus," interrupted the other.

"Well, then," cried Lucas, "and why should Jesus have nothing to

do with his church--why should his words and his life be of no

authority among those who profess to adore him? Here is a man

who was the world's first revolutionist, the true founder of the

Socialist movement; a man whose whole being was one flame of

hatred for wealth, and all that wealth stands for,--for the pride

of wealth, and the luxury of wealth, and the tyranny of wealth;

who was himself a beggar and a tramp, a man of the people, an

associate of saloon-keepers and women of the town; who again and

again, in the most explicit language, denounced wealth and the

holding of wealth: 'Lay not up for yourselves treasures on

earth!'--'Sell that ye have and give alms!'--'Blessed are ye

poor, for yours is the kingdom of Heaven!'--'Woe unto you that

are rich, for ye have received your consolation!'--'Verily, I say

unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of

Heaven!' Who denounced in unmeasured terms the exploiters of his

own time: 'Woe unto you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites!'--

'Woe unto you also, you lawyers!'--'Ye serpents, ye generation of

vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?' Who drove out

the businessmen and brokers from the temple with a whip! Who was

crucified--think of it--for an incendiary and a disturber of the

social order! And this man they have made into the high priest

of property and smug respectability, a divine sanction of all the

horrors and abominations of modern commercial civilization!

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

him, and modern pirates of industry bring their dollars, wrung

from the toil of helpless women and children, and build temples

to him, and sit in cushioned seats and listen to his teachings

expounded by doctors of dusty divinity--"

"Bravo!" cried Schliemann, laughing. But the other was in full

career--he had talked this subject every day for five years, and

had never yet let himself be stopped. "This Jesus of Nazareth!"

he cried. "This class-conscious working-man! This union

carpenter! This agitator, law-breaker, firebrand, anarchist!

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

bodies and souls of human beings into dollars--if he could come

into the world this day and see the things that men have made in

his name, would it not blast his soul with horror? Would he not

go mad at the sight of it, he the Prince of Mercy and Love! That

dreadful night when he lay in the Garden of Gethsemane and

writhed in agony until he sweat blood--do you think that he saw

anything worse than he might see tonight upon the plains of

Manchuria, where men march out with a jeweled image of him before

them, to do wholesale murder for the benefit of foul monsters of

sensuality and cruelty? Do you not know that if he were in St.

Petersburg now, he would take the whip with which he drove out

the bankers from his temple--"

Here the speaker paused an instant for breath. "No, comrade,"

said the other, dryly, "for he was a practical man. He would

take pretty little imitation lemons, such as are now being

shipped into Russia, handy for carrying in the pockets, and

strong enough to blow a whole temple out of sight."

Lucas waited until the company had stopped laughing over this;

then he began again: "But look at it from the point of view of

practical politics, comrade. Here is an historical figure whom

all men reverence and love, whom some regard as divine; and who

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

now shall we leave him in the hands of his enemies--shall we

allow them to stifle and stultify his example? We have his

words, which no one can deny; and shall we not quote them to the

people, and prove to them what he was, and what he taught, and

what he did? No, no, a thousand times no!--we shall use his

authority to turn out the knaves and sluggards from his ministry,

and we shall yet rouse the people to action!--"

Lucas halted again; and the other stretched out his hand to a

paper on the table. "Here, comrade," he said, with a laugh,

"here is a place for you to begin. A bishop whose wife has just

been robbed of fifty thousand dollars' worth of diamonds! And a

most unctuous and oily of bishops! An eminent and scholarly

bishop! A philanthropist and friend of labor bishop--a Civic

Federation decoy duck for the chloroforming of the wage-working-

man!"

To this little passage of arms the rest of the company sat as

spectators. But now Mr. Maynard, the editor, took occasion to

remark, somewhat naively, that he had always understood that

Socialists had a cut-and-dried program for the future of

civilization; whereas here were two active members of the party,

who, from what he could make out, were agreed about nothing at

all. Would the two, for his enlightenment, try to ascertain just

what they had in common, and why they belonged to the same party?

This resulted, after much debating, in the formulating of two

carefully worded propositions: First, that a Socialist believes

in the common ownership and democratic management of the means of

producing the necessities of life; and, second, that a Socialist

believes that the means by which this is to be brought about is

the class conscious political organization of the wage-earners.

Thus far they were at one; but no farther. To Lucas, the

religious zealot, the co-operative commonwealth was the New

Jerusalem, the kingdom of Heaven, which is "within you." To the

other, Socialism was simply a necessary step toward a far-distant

goal, a step to be tolerated with impatience. Schliemann called

himself a "philosophic anarchist"; and he explained that an

anarchist was one who believed that the end of human existence

was the free development of every personality, unrestricted by

laws save those of its own being. Since the same kind of match

would light every one's fire and the same-shaped loaf of bread

would fill every one's stomach, it would be perfectly feasible to

submit industry to the control of a majority vote. There was

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

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

limit, and one could have more without another's having less;

hence "Communism in material production, anarchism in

intellectual," was the formula of modern proletarian thought.

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

been healed, there would be established a simple system whereby

each man was credited with his labor and debited with his

purchases; and after that the processes of production, exchange,

and consumption would go on automatically, and without our being

conscious of them, any more than a man is conscious of the

beating of his heart. And then, explained Schliemann, society

would break up into independent, self-governing communities of

mutually congenial persons; examples of which at present were

clubs, churches, and political parties. After the revolution,

all the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual activities of men

would be cared for by such "free associations"; romantic

novelists would be supported by those who liked to read romantic

novels, and impressionist painters would be supported by those

who liked to look at impressionist pictures--and the same with

preachers and scientists, editors and actors and musicians. If

any one wanted to work or paint or pray, and could find no one to

maintain him, he could support himself by working part of the

time. That was the case at present, the only difference being

that the competitive wage system compelled a man to work all the

time to live, while, after the abolition of privilege and

exploitation, any one would be able to support himself by an

hour's work a day. Also the artist's audience of the present was

a small minority of people, all debased and vulgarized by the

effort it had cost them to win in the commercial battle, of the

intellectual and artistic activities which would result when the

whole of mankind was set free from the nightmare of competition,

we could at present form no conception whatever.

And then the editor wanted to know upon what ground Dr.

Schliemann asserted that it might be possible for a society to

exist upon an hour's toil by each of its members. "Just what,"

answered the other, "would be the productive capacity of society

if the present resources of science were utilized, we have no

means of ascertaining; but we may be sure it would exceed

anything that would sound reasonable to minds inured to the

ferocious barbarities of capitalism. After the triumph of the

international proletariat, war would of course be inconceivable;

and who can figure the cost of war to humanity--not merely the

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

the cost of keeping millions of men in idleness, of arming and

equipping them for battle and parade, but the drain upon the

vital energies of society by the war attitude and the war terror,

the brutality and ignorance, the drunkenness, prostitution, and

crime it entails, the industrial impotence and the moral

deadness? Do you think that it would be too much to say that two

hours of the working time of every efficient member of a

community goes to feed the red fiend of war?"

And then Schliemann went on to outline some of the wastes of

competition: the losses of industrial warfare; the ceaseless

worry and friction; the vices--such as drink, for instance, the

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

of the intensification of the economic struggle; the idle and

unproductive members of the community, the frivolous rich and the

pauperized poor; the law and the whole machinery of repression;

the wastes of social ostentation, the milliners and tailors, the

hairdressers, dancing masters, chefs and lackeys. "You

understand," he said, "that in a society dominated by the fact of

commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess,

and wastefulness the sole criterion of power. So we have, at the

present moment, a society with, say, thirty per cent of the

population occupied in producing useless articles, and one per

cent occupied in destroying them. And this is not all; for the

servants and panders of the parasites are also parasites, the

milliners and the jewelers and the lackeys have also to be

supported by the useful members of the community. And bear in

mind also that this monstrous disease affects not merely the

idlers and their menials, its poison penetrates the whole social

body. Beneath the hundred thousand women of the elite are a

million middle-class women, miserable because they are not of the

elite, and trying to appear of it in public; and beneath them,

in turn, are five million farmers' wives reading 'fashion papers'

and trimming bonnets, and shop-girls and serving-maids selling

themselves into brothels for cheap jewelry and imitation seal-

skin robes. And then consider that, added to this competition in

display, you have, like oil on the flames, a whole system of

competition in selling! You have manufacturers contriving tens

of thousands of catchpenny devices, storekeepers displaying them,

and newspapers and magazines filled up with advertisements of

them!"

"And don't forget the wastes of fraud," put in young Fisher.

"When one comes to the ultra-modern profession of advertising,"

responded Schliemann--"the science of persuading people to buy

what they do not want--he is in the very center of the ghastly

charnel house of capitalist destructiveness, and he scarcely

knows which of a dozen horrors to point out first. But consider

the waste in time and energy incidental to making ten thousand

varieties of a thing for purposes of ostentation and

snobbishness, where one variety would do for use! Consider all

the waste incidental to the manufacture of cheap qualities of

goods, of goods made to sell and deceive the ignorant; consider

the wastes of adulteration,--the shoddy clothing, the cotton

blankets, the unstable tenements, the ground-cork life-

preservers, the adulterated milk, the aniline soda water, the

potato-flour sausages--"

"And consider the moral aspects of the thing," put in the

ex-preacher.

"Precisely," said Schliemann; "the low knavery and the ferocious

cruelty incidental to them, the plotting and the lying and the

bribing, the blustering and bragging, the screaming egotism, the

hurrying and worrying. Of course, imitation and adulteration are

the essence of competition--they are but another form of the

phrase 'to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest.'

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

a billion and a quarter dollars a year through adulterated foods;

which means, of course, not only materials wasted that might have

been useful outside of the human stomach, but doctors and nurses

for people who would otherwise have been well, and undertakers

for the whole human race ten or twenty years before the proper

time. Then again, consider the waste of time and energy required

to sell these things in a dozen stores, where one would do.

There are a million or two of business firms in the country,

and five or ten times as many clerks; and consider the handling and

rehandling, the accounting and reaccounting, the planning and

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

whole machinery of the civil law made necessary by these

processes; the libraries of ponderous tomes, the courts and

juries to interpret them, the lawyers studying to circumvent

them, the pettifogging and chicanery, the hatreds and lies!

Consider the wastes incidental to the blind and haphazard

production of commodities--the factories closed, the workers

idle, the goods spoiling in storage; consider the activities of

the stock manipulator, the paralyzing of whole industries, the

overstimulation of others, for speculative purposes; the

assignments and bank failures, the crises and panics, the

deserted towns and the starving populations! Consider the

energies wasted in the seeking of markets, the sterile trades,

such as drummer, solicitor, bill-poster, advertising agent.

Consider the wastes incidental to the crowding into cities, made

necessary by competition and by monopoly railroad rates; consider

the slums, the bad air, the disease and the waste of vital

energies; consider the office buildings, the waste of time and

material in the piling of story upon story, and the burrowing

underground! Then take the whole business of insurance, the

enormous mass of administrative and clerical labor it involves,

and all utter waste--"

"I do not follow that," said the editor. "The Cooperative

Commonwealth is a universal automatic insurance company and

savings bank for all its members. Capital being the property of

all, injury to it is shared by all and made up by all. The bank

is the universal government credit-account, the ledger in which

every individual's earnings and spendings ate balanced. There is

also a universal government bulletin, in which are listed and

precisely described everything which the commonwealth has for

sale. As no one makes any profit by the sale, there is no longer

any stimulus to extravagance, and no misrepresentation; no

cheating, no adulteration or imitation, no bribery or

'grafting.'"

"How is the price of an article determined?"

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

it is determined by the first principles of arithmetic. The

million workers in the nation's wheat fields have worked a

hundred days each, and the total product of the labor is a

billion bushels, so the value of a bushel of wheat is the tenth

part of a farm labor-day. If we employ an arbitrary symbol, and

pay, say, five dollars a day for farm work, then the cost of a

bushel of wheat is fifty cents."

"You say 'for farm work,'" said Mr. Maynard. "Then labor is not

to be paid alike?"

"Manifestly not, since some work is easy and some hard, and we

should have millions of rural mail carriers, and no coal miners.

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

one or the other will have to be varied continually, according as

a greater or less number of workers is needed in any particular

industry. That is precisely what is done at present, except that

the transfer of the workers is accomplished blindly and

imperfectly, by rumors and advertisements, instead of instantly

and completely, by a universal government bulletin."

"How about those occupations in which time is difficult to

calculate? What is the labor cost of a book?"

"Obviously it is the labor cost of the paper, printing, and

binding of it--about a fifth of its present cost."

"And the author?"

"I have already said that the state could not control

intellectual production. The state might say that it had taken a

year to write the book, and the author might say it had taken

thirty. Goethe said that every bon mot of his had cost a purse

of gold. What I outline here is a national, or rather

international, system for the providing of the material needs of

men. Since a man has intellectual needs also, he will work

longer, earn more, and provide for them to his own taste and in

his own way. I live on the same earth as the majority, I wear

the same kind of shoes and sleep in the same kind of bed; but I

do not think the same kind of thoughts, and I do not wish to pay

for such thinkers as the majority selects. I wish such things to

be left to free effort, as at present. If people want to listen

to a certain preacher, they get together and contribute what they

please, and pay for a church and support the preacher, and then

listen to him; I, who do not want to listen to him, stay away,

and it costs me nothing. In the same way there are magazines

about Egyptian coins, and Catholic saints, and flying machines,

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

the other hand, if wage slavery were abolished, and I could earn

some spare money without paying tribute to an exploiting

capitalist, then there would be a magazine for the purpose of

interpreting and popularizing the gospel of Friedrich Nietzsche,

the prophet of Evolution, and also of Horace Fletcher, the

inventor of the noble science of clean eating; and incidentally,

perhaps, for the discouraging of long skirts, and the scientific

breeding of men and women, and the establishing of divorce by

mutual consent."

Dr. Schliemann paused for a moment. "That was a lecture," he

said with a laugh, "and yet I am only begun!"

"What else is there?" asked Maynard.

"I have pointed out some of the negative wastes of competition,"

answered the other. "I have hardly mentioned the positive

economies of co-operation. Allowing five to a family, there are

fifteen million families in this country; and at least ten

million of these live separately, the domestic drudge being

either the wife or a wage slave. Now set aside the modern system

of pneumatic house-cleaning, and the economies of co-operative

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

Surely it is moderate to say that the dishwashing 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 dishwashing of the country. And note that this

is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a

cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of

prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and

degenerate children--for all of which things the community has

naturally to pay. And now consider that in each of my little

free communities there would be a machine which would wash and

dry the dishes, and do it, not merely to the eye and the touch,

but scientifically--sterilizing them--and do it at a saving of

all the drudgery and nine-tenths of the time! All of these

things you may find in the books of Mrs. Gilman; and then take

Kropotkin's Fields, Factories, and Workshops, and read about the

new science of agriculture, which has been built up in the last

ten years; by which, with made soils and intensive culture, a

gardener can raise ten or twelve crops in a season, and two

hundred tons of vegetables upon a single acre; by which the

population of the whole globe could be supported on the soil now

cultivated in the United States alone! It is impossible to apply

such methods now, owing to the ignorance and poverty of our

scattered farming population; but imagine the problem of

providing the food supply of our nation once taken in hand

systematically and rationally, by scientists! All the poor and

rocky land set apart for a national timber reserve, in which our

children play, and our young men hunt, and our poets dwell! The

most favorable climate and soil for each product selected;

the exact requirements of the community known, and the acreage

figured accordingly; the most improved machinery employed, under

the direction of expert agricultural chemists! I was brought up

on a farm, and I know the awful deadliness of farm work; and I

like to picture it all as it will be after the revolution. To

picture the great potato-planting machine, drawn by four horses,

or an electric motor, ploughing the furrow, cutting and dropping

and covering the potatoes, and planting a score of acres a day!

To picture the great potato-digging machine, run by electricity,

perhaps, and moving across a thousand-acre field, scooping up

earth and potatoes, and dropping the latter into sacks! To every

other kind of vegetable and fruit handled in the same way--apples

and oranges picked by machinery, cows milked by

electricity--things which are already done, as you may know. To

picture the harvest fields of the future, to which millions of

happy men and women come for a summer holiday, brought by special

trains, the exactly needful number to each place! And to

contrast all this with our present agonizing system of

independent small farming,--a stunted, haggard, ignorant man,

mated with a yellow, lean, and sad-eyed drudge, and toiling from

four o'clock in the morning until nine at night, working the

children as soon as they are able to walk, scratching the soil

with its primitive tools, and shut out from all knowledge and

hope, from all their benefits of science and invention, and all

the joys of the spirit--held to a bare existence by competition

in labor, and boasting of his freedom because he is too blind to

see his chains!"

Dr. Schliemann paused a moment. "And then," he continued,

"place beside this fact of an unlimited food supply, the newest

discovery of physiologists, that most of the ills of the human

system are due to overfeeding! And then again, it has been

proven that meat is unnecessary as a food; and meat is obviously

more difficult to produce than vegetable food, less pleasant to

prepare and handle, and more likely to be unclean. But what of

that, so long as it tickles the palate more strongly?"

"How would Socialism change that?" asked the girl-student,

quickly. It was the first time she had spoken.

"So long as we have wage slavery," answered Schliemann, "it

matters not in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may

be, it is easy to find people to perform it. But just as soon as

labor is set free, then the price of such work will begin to

rise. So one by one the old, dingy, and unsanitary factories

will come down--it will be cheaper to build new; and so the

steamships will be provided with stoking machinery, and so the

dangerous trades will be made safe, or substitutes will be found

for their products. In exactly the same way, as the citizens of

our Industrial Republic become refined, year by year the cost of

slaughterhouse products will increase; until eventually those who

want to eat meat will have to do their own killing--and how long

do you think the custom would survive then?--To go on to another

item--one of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a

democracy is political corruption; and one of the consequences of

civic administration by ignorant and vicious politicians, is that

preventable diseases kill off half our population. And even if

science were allowed to try, it could do little, because the

majority of human beings are not yet human beings at all, but

simply machines for the creating of wealth for others. They are

penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery,

and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all

the doctors in the world could heal them; and so, of course,

they remain as centers of contagion, poisoning the lives of all of us,

and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish. For

this reason I would seriously maintain that all the medical and

surgical discoveries that science can make in the future will be

of less importance than the application of the knowledge we

already possess, when the disinherited of the earth have

established their right to a human existence."

And here the Herr Doctor relapsed into silence again. Jurgis had

noticed that the beautiful young girl who sat by the center-table

was listening with something of the same look that he himself had

worn, the time when he had first discovered Socialism. Jurgis

would have liked to talk to her, he felt sure that she would have

understood him. Later on in the evening, when the group broke

up, he heard Mrs. Fisher say to her, in a low voice, "I wonder if

Mr. Maynard will still write the same things about Socialism"; to

which she answered, "I don't know--but if he does we shall know

that he is a knave!"

And only a few hours after this came election day--when the long

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

and hold its breath, awaiting the issue. Jurgis and the rest of

the staff of Hinds's Hotel could hardly stop to finish their

dinner, before they hurried off to the big hall which the party

had hired for that evening.

But already there were people waiting, and already the telegraph

instrument on the stage had begun clicking off the returns. When

the final accounts were made up, the Socialist vote proved to be

over four hundred thousand--an increase of something like three

hundred and fifty per cent in four years. And that was doing

well; but the party was dependent for its early returns upon

messages from the locals, and naturally those locals which had

been most successful were the ones which felt most like

reporting; and so that night every one in the hall believed that

the vote was going to be six, or seven, or even eight hundred

thousand. Just such an incredible increase had actually been

made in Chicago, and in the state; the vote of the city had been

6,700 in 1900, and now it was 47,000; that of Illinois had been

9,600, and now it was 69,000! So, as the evening waxed, and the

crowd piled in, the meeting was a sight to be seen. Bulletins

would be read, and the people would shout themselves hoarse --

and then some one would make a speech, and there would be more

shouting; and then a brief silence, and more bulletins. There

would come messages from the secretaries of neighboring states,

reporting their achievements; the vote of Indiana had gone from

2,300 to 12,000, of Wisconsin from 7,000 to 28,000; of Ohio from

4,800 to 36,000! There were telegrams to the national office

from enthusiastic individuals in little towns which had made

amazing and unprecedented increases in a single year: Benedict,

Kansas, from 26 to 260; Henderson, Kentucky, from 19 to 111;

Holland, Michigan, from 14 to 208; Cleo, Oklahoma, from 0 to 104;

Martin's Ferry, Ohio, from 0 to 296--and many more of the same

kind. There were literally hundreds of such towns; there would

be reports from half a dozen of them in a single batch of

telegrams. And the men who read the despatches off to the

audience were old campaigners, who had been to the places and

helped to make the vote, and could make appropriate comments:

Quincy, Illinois, from 189 to 831--that was where the mayor had

arrested a Socialist speaker! Crawford County, Kansas, from 285

to 1,975; that was the home of the "Appeal to Reason"! Battle

Creek, Michigan, from 4,261 to 10,184; that was the answer of

labor to the Citizens' Alliance Movement!

And then there were official returns from the various precincts

and wards of the city itself! Whether it was a factory district

or one of the "silk-stocking" wards seemed to make no particular

difference in the increase; but one of the things which surprised

the party leaders most was the tremendous vote that came rolling

in from the stockyards. Packingtown comprised three wards of the

city, and the vote in the spring of 1903 had been 500, and in the

fall of the same year, 1,600. Now, only one year later, it was

over 6,300--and the Democratic vote only 8,800! There were other

wards in which the Democratic vote had been actually surpassed,

and in two districts, members of the state legislature had been

elected. Thus Chicago now led the country; it had set a new

standard for the party, it had shown the workingmen the way!

--So spoke an orator upon the platform; and two thousand pairs of

eyes were fixed upon him, and two thousand voices were cheering

his every sentence. The orator had been the head of the city's

relief bureau in the stockyards, until the sight of misery and

corruption had made him sick. He was young, hungry-looking, full

of fire; and as he swung his long arms and beat up the crowd, to

Jurgis he seemed the very spirit of the revolution. "Organize!

Organize! Organize!"--that was his cry. He was afraid of this

tremendous vote, which his party had not expected, and which it

had not earned. "These men are not Socialists!" he cried. "This

election will pass, and the excitement will die, and people will

forget about it; and if you forget about it, too, if you sink

back and rest upon your oars, we shall lose this vote that we

have polled to-day, and our enemies will laugh us to scorn! It

rests with you to take your resolution--now, in the flush of

victory, to find these men who have voted for us, and bring them

to our meetings, and organize them and bind them to us! We shall

not find all our campaigns as easy as this one. Everywhere in

the country tonight the old party politicians are studying this

vote, and setting their sails by it; and nowhere will they be

quicker or more cunning than here in our own city. Fifty

thousand Socialist votes in Chicago means a municipal-ownership

Democracy in the spring! And then they will fool the voters once

more, and all the powers of plunder and corruption will be swept

into office again! But whatever they may do when they get in,

there is one thing they will not do, and that will be the thing

for which they were elected! They will not give the people of

our city municipal ownership--they will not mean to do it, they

will not try to do it; all that they will do is give our party in

Chicago the greatest opportunity that has ever come to Socialism

in America! We shall have the sham reformers self-stultified and

self-convicted; we shall have the radical Democracy left without

a lie with which to cover its nakedness! And then will begin the

rush that will never be checked, the tide that will never turn

till it has reached its flood--that will be irresistible,

overwhelming--the rallying of the outraged workingmen of Chicago

to our standard! And we shall organize them, we shall drill

them, we shall marshal them for the victory! We shall bear down

the opposition, we shall sweep if before us--and Chicago will be

ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!"

The End.

"The jungle", by Upton Sinclair.


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