The Jungle
crazed by pain, turned into fiends by fury and hate! Put your hand upon
that piece of flesh—it is hot and quivering—just now it was a part of a
man! This blood is still steaming—it was driven by a human heart!
Almighty God! and this goes on—it is systematic, organized,
premeditated! And we know it, and read of it, and take it for granted;
our papers tell of it, and the presses are not stopped—our churches
know of it, and do not close their doors—the people behold it, and do
not rise up in horror and revolution!
“Or perhaps Manchuria is too far away for you—come home with me then,
come here to Chicago. Here in this city to-night ten thousand women are
shut up in foul pens, and driven by hunger to sell their bodies to
live. And we know it, we make it a jest! And these women are made in
the image of your mothers, they may be your sisters, your daughters;
the child whom you left at home tonight, whose laughing eyes will greet
you in the morning—that fate may be waiting for her! To-night in
Chicago there are ten thousand men, homeless and wretched, willing to
work and begging for a chance, yet starving, and fronting in terror the
awful winter cold! Tonight in Chicago there are a hundred thousand
children wearing out their strength and blasting their lives in the
effort to earn their bread! There are a hundred thousand mothers who
are living in misery and squalor, struggling to earn enough to feed
their little ones! There are a hundred thousand old people, cast off
and helpless, waiting for death to take them from their torments! There
are a million people, men and women and children, who share the curse
of the wage-slave; who toil every hour they can stand and see, for just
enough to keep them alive; who are condemned till the end of their days
to monotony and weariness, to hunger and misery, to heat and cold, to
dirt and disease, to ignorance and drunkenness and vice! And then turn
over the page with me, and gaze upon the other side of the picture.
There are a thousand—ten thousand, maybe—who are the masters of these
slaves, who own their toil. They do nothing to earn what they receive,
they do not even have to ask for it—it comes to them of itself, their
only care is to dispose of it. They live in palaces, they riot in
luxury and extravagance—such as no words can describe, as makes the
imagination reel and stagger, makes the soul grow sick and faint. They
spend hundreds of dollars for a pair of shoes, a handkerchief, a
garter; they spend millions for horses and automobiles and yachts, for
palaces and banquets, for little shiny stones with which to deck their
bodies. Their life is a contest among themselves for supremacy in
ostentation and recklessness, in the destroying of useful and necessary
things, in the wasting of the labor and the lives of their fellow
creatures, the toil and anguish of the nations, the sweat and tears and
blood of the human race! It is all theirs—it comes to them; just as all
the springs pour into streamlets, and the streamlets into rivers, and
the rivers into the oceans—so, automatically and inevitably, all the
wealth of society comes to them. The farmer tills the soil, the miner
digs in the earth, the weaver tends the loom, the mason carves the
stone; the clever man invents, the shrewd man directs, the wise man
studies, the inspired man sings—and all the result, the products of the
labor of brain and muscle, are gathered into one stupendous stream and
poured into their laps! The whole of society is in their grip, the
whole labor of the world lies at their mercy—and like fierce wolves
they rend and destroy, like ravening vultures they devour and tear! The
whole power of mankind belongs to them, forever and beyond recall—do
what it can, strive as it will, humanity lives for them and dies for
them! They own not merely the labor of society, they have bought the
governments; and everywhere they use their raped and stolen power to
intrench themselves in their privileges, to dig wider and deeper the
channels through which the river of profits flows to them!—And you,
workingmen, workingmen! You have been brought up to it, you plod on
like beasts of burden, thinking only of the day and its pain—yet is
there a man among you who can believe that such a system will continue
forever—is there a man here in this audience tonight so hardened and
debased that he dare rise up before me and say that he believes it can
continue forever; that the product of the labor of society, the means
of existence of the human race, will always belong to idlers and
parasites, to be spent for the gratification of vanity and lust—to be
spent for any purpose whatever, to be at the disposal of any individual
will whatever—that somehow, somewhere, the labor of humanity will not
belong to humanity, to be used for the purposes of humanity, to be
controlled by the will of humanity? And if this is ever to be, how is
it to be—what power is there that will bring it about? Will it be the
task of your masters, do you think—will they write the charter of your
liberties? Will they forge you the sword of your deliverance, will they
marshal you the army and lead it to the fray? Will their wealth be
spent for the purpose—will they build colleges and churches to teach
you, will they print papers to herald your progress, and organize
political parties to guide and carry on the struggle? Can you not see
that the task is your task—yours to dream, yours to resolve, yours to
execute? That if ever it is carried out, it will be in the face of
every obstacle that wealth and mastership can oppose—in the face of
ridicule and slander, of hatred and persecution, of the bludgeon and
the jail? That it will be by the power of your naked bosoms, opposed to
the rage of oppression! By the grim and bitter teaching of blind and
merciless affliction! By the painful gropings of the untutored mind, by
the feeble stammerings of the uncultured voice! By the sad and lonely
hunger of the spirit; by seeking and striving and yearning, by
heartache and despairing, by agony and sweat of blood! It will be by
money paid for with hunger, by knowledge stolen from sleep, by thoughts
communicated under the shadow of the gallows! It will be a movement
beginning in the far-off past, a thing obscure and unhonored, a thing
easy to ridicule, easy to despise; a thing unlovely, wearing the aspect
of vengeance and hate—but to you, the working-man, the wage-slave,
calling with a voice insistent, imperious—with a voice that you cannot
escape, wherever upon the earth you may be! With the voice of all your
wrongs, with the voice of all your desires; with the voice of your duty
and your hope—of everything in the world that is worth while to you!
The voice of the poor, demanding that poverty shall cease! The voice of
the oppressed, pronouncing the doom of oppression! The voice of power,
wrought out of suffering—of resolution, crushed out of weakness—of joy
and courage, born in the bottomless pit of anguish and despair! The
voice of Labor, despised and outraged; a mighty giant, lying
prostrate—mountainous, colossal, but blinded, bound, and ignorant of
his strength. And now a dream of resistance haunts him, hope battling
with fear; until suddenly he stirs, and a fetter snaps—and a thrill
shoots through him, to the farthest ends of his huge body, and in a
flash the dream becomes an act! He starts, he lifts himself; and the
bands are shattered, the burdens roll off him—he rises—towering,
gigantic; he springs to his feet, he shouts in his newborn exultation—”
And the speaker’s voice broke suddenly, with the stress of his
feelings; he stood with his arms stretched out above him, and the power
of his vision seemed to lift him from the floor. The audience came to
its feet with a yell; men waved their arms, laughing aloud in their
excitement. And Jurgis was with them, he was shouting to tear his
throat; shouting because he could not help it, because the stress of
his feeling was more than he could bear. It was not merely the man’s
words, the torrent of his eloquence. It was his presence, it was his
voice: a voice with strange intonations that rang through the chambers
of the soul like the clanging of a bell—that gripped the listener like
a mighty hand about his body, that shook him and startled him with
sudden fright, with a sense of things not of earth, of mysteries never
spoken before, of presences of awe and terror! There was an unfolding
of vistas before him, a breaking of the ground beneath him, an
upheaving, a stirring, a trembling; he felt himself suddenly a mere man
no longer—there were powers within him undreamed of, there were demon
forces contending, age-long wonders struggling to be born; and he sat
oppressed with pain and joy, while a tingling stole down into his
finger tips, and his breath came hard and fast. The sentences of this
man were to Jurgis like the crashing of thunder in his soul; a flood of
emotions surged up in him—all his old hopes and longings, his old
griefs and rages and despairs. All that he had ever felt in his whole
life seemed to come back to him at once, and with one new emotion,
hardly to be described. That he should have suffered such oppressions
and such horrors was bad enough; but that he should have been crushed
and beaten by them, that he should have submitted, and forgotten, and
lived in peace—ah, truly that was a thing not to be put into words, a
thing not to be borne by a human creature, a thing of terror and
madness! “What,” asks the prophet, “is the murder of them that kill the
body, to the murder of them that kill the soul?” And Jurgis was a man
whose soul had been murdered, who had ceased to hope and to
struggle—who had made terms with degradation and despair; and now,
suddenly, in one awful convulsion, the black and hideous fact was made
plain to him! There was a falling in of all the pillars of his soul,
the sky seemed to split above him—he stood there, with his clenched
hands upraised, his eyes bloodshot, and the veins standing out purple
in his face, roaring in the voice of a wild beast, frantic, incoherent,
maniacal. And when he could shout no more he still stood there,
gasping, and whispering hoarsely to himself: “By God! By God! By God!”
CHAPTER XXIX
The man had gone back to a seat upon the platform, and Jurgis realized
that his speech was over. The applause continued for several minutes;
and then some one started a song, and the crowd took it up, and the
place shook with it. Jurgis had never heard it, and he could not make
out the words, but the wild and wonderful spirit of it seized upon
him—it was the “Marseillaise!” As stanza after stanza of it thundered
forth, he sat with his hands clasped, trembling in every nerve. He had
never been so stirred in his life—it was a miracle that had been
wrought in him. He could not think at all, he was stunned; yet he knew
that in the mighty upheaval that had taken place in his soul, a new man
had been born. He had been torn out of the jaws of destruction, he had
been delivered from the thraldom of despair; the whole world had been
changed for him—he was free, he was free! Even if he were to suffer as
he had before, even if he were to beg and starve, nothing would be the
same to him; he would understand it, and bear it. He would no longer be
the sport of circumstances, he would be a man, with a will and a
purpose; he would have something to fight for, something to die for, if
need be! Here were men who would show him and help him; and he would
have friends and allies, he would dwell in the sight of justice, and
walk arm in arm with power.
The audience subsided again, and Jurgis sat back. The chairman of the
meeting came forward and began to speak. His voice sounded thin and
futile after the other’s, and to Jurgis it seemed a profanation. Why