--even the whole city, with an all-inclusive hatred, bitter
and fierce. Women and little children would fall to cursing about it; it
was rotten, rotten as hell--everything was rotten. When Jurgis would ask
them what they meant, they would begin to get suspicious, and content
themselves with saying, "Never mind, you stay here and see for
yourself."

One of the first problems that Jurgis ran upon was that of the unions.
He had had no experience with unions, and he had to have it explained
to him that the men were banded together for the purpose of fighting
for their rights. Jurgis asked them what they meant by their rights, a
question in which he was quite sincere, for he had not any idea of any
rights that he had, except the right to hunt for a job, and do as he was
told when he got it. Generally, however, this harmless question would
only make his fellow workingmen lose their tempers and call him a fool.
There was a delegate of the butcher-helpers' union who came to see
Jurgis to enroll him; and when Jurgis found that this meant that he
would have to part with some of his money, he froze up directly, and the
delegate, who was an Irishman and only knew a few words of Lithuanian,
lost his temper and began to threaten him. In the end Jurgis got into a
fine rage, and made it sufficiently plain that it would take more than
one Irishman to scare him into a union. Little by little he gathered
that the main thing the men wanted was to put a stop to the habit of
"speeding-up"; they were trying their best to force a lessening of the
pace, for there were some, they said, who could not keep up with it,
whom it was killing. But Jurgis had no sympathy with such ideas as
this--he could do the work himself, and so could the rest of them, he
declared, if they were good for anything. If they couldn't do it, let
them go somewhere else. Jurgis had not studied the books, and he would
not have known how to pronounce "laissez faire"; but he had been round
the world enough to know that a man has to shift for himself in it,
and that if he gets the worst of it, there is nobody to listen to him
holler.

Yet there have been known to be philosophers and plain men who swore
by Malthus in the books, and would, nevertheless, subscribe to a relief
fund in time of a famine. It was the same with Jurgis, who consigned the
unfit to destruction, while going about all day sick at heart because
of his poor old father, who was wandering somewhere in the yards