The Jungle

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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!"