From
The Jungle.
"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, agelong
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!"
The Jungle Chapter 29