The Jungle
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!”