So Jurgis acquired the reading habit. He would carry in his pocket a
tract or a pamphlet which some one had loaned him, and whenever he had
an idle moment during the day he would plod 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 porters at Hinds's was a
sharp little Irishman, who knew everything that Jurgis 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, Jurgis 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 orator were 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 Jurgis 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 the
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 Whitechapel 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 at 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 any
one 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 predaceous; 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 inexorable, 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
Jurgis heard the two standard-bearers of his party. Ten years before
there had been in Chicago a strike of a hundred and fifty thousand
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 his 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 manhood gleamed in it--and the tears of
suffering little children pleaded in his voice. When he spoke he paced
the stage, lithe and eager, like a panther. He leaned over, reaching out
for his audience; he pointed into their souls with an insistent finger.
His voice was husky from much speaking, but the great auditorium was as
still as death, and every one heard him.

And then, as Jurgis came out from this meeting, some one 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; its 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
pet-poodle establishment of a society dame, beside the fate of Mrs.
Murphy of San Francisco, who had starved to 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 partyites 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, for 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 Ike," "the Bald-headed Man," "the Redheaded Girl,"
"the Bulldog," "the Office Goat," and "the One Hoss."

But sometimes, again, the "Appeal" would be desperately serious. It sent
a correspondent to Colorado, 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 Jurgis was a manifesto
addressed to striking workingmen, 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!" it 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, and
every evening, and on Sundays, the members of the Packingtown locals
would get armfuls and distribute them on the streets and in the houses.
The people of Packingtown 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. Jurgis 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
Scully's ten-pin setter to the city Board of Aldermen.

It was quite marvelous to see what a difference twelve months had
made in Packingtown--the eyes of the people were getting opened! The
Socialists were literally sweeping everything before them that election,
and Scully and the Cook County machine were at their wits' end for an
"issue." At the very close of the campaign they bethought themselves of
the fact that the strike had been broken by Negroes, and so they sent
for a South Carolina fire-eater, the "pitchfork senator," as he was
called, a man who took off his coat when he talked to workingmen,
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
senator" stood their fusillade of questions for about an hour, and then
went home in disgust, and the balance of the meeting was a strictly
party affair. Jurgis, 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 got 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
Jurgis shouting furiously, "It's a lie! It's a lie!" After which he went
on to tell them how he knew it--that he knew it because he had bought
them himself! And he would have told the "pitchfork senator" all his
experiences, had not Harry Adams and a friend grabbed him about the neck
and shoved him into a seat.


Chapter 31


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 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 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