al relatives. But while "The
Jungle" will undoubtedly make more vegetarians, it would take more than
the practice of universal vegetarianism to cause the book to fulfil its
mission; for this is a story of Civilization's Inferno and of the crisis
of the world, a recital of conditions for which, when once comprehended,
there can be no remedy but the revolution of revolutions, the event
toward which the ages ran, the establishment of a genuine political,
industrial and social democracy.[2]

If the story be dramatized and Mrs. Fiske take the part of Ona, her
presentation will make Tess seem like a pastoral idyll in comparison.

The book is great even from a political standpoint.

But more than this, it is a great moral appeal. Not in Victor Hugo or
Charles Dickens does the moral passion burn with purer or intenser light
than in these pages.

I should not advise children or very delicately constituted women to
read it.

I have said it is a book of horrors. I started to mark the passages of
peculiar tragedy and found that I was marking every page, and yet it is
a justifiable book and a necessary book.

The author tells as facts the story of "diseased meat," and worse, the
preparation in the night time of the bodies of the cattle which have
died from known and unknown causes before reaching the slaughter pens,
and the distribution of the effects, with the rest of the intentional
killing of the day; he describes the preparation of "embalmed beef" from
cattle covered with boils; he even narrates the story of "men who fell
into the vats," and "sometimes they would be overlooked for days till
all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure
Leaf Lard"; he writes of the making of smoked sausage out of waste
potatoes by the use of chemicals and out of spoiled meat as well; and he
further speaks of rats which were "nuisances, and the packers would put
poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread and
meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no
joke; the meat would be shovelled into carts and the man who did the
shovelling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw
one--there were things which went into the sausage in comparison with
which a poisoned rat was a tidbit."

But the worst of the story is a tale of the condition of the workers at
Packingtown and elsewhere. It is the story of strong men who justly
hated their work; of men, for no fault of th