election
day came, the packing houses posted a notice that men who desired to
vote might remain away until nine that morning, and the same night
watchman took Jurgis and the rest of his flock into the back room of a
saloon, and showed each of them where and how to mark a ballot, and then
gave each two dollars, and took them to the polling place, where there
was a policeman on duty especially to see that they got through all
right. Jurgis felt quite proud of this good luck till he got home and
met Jonas, who had taken the leader aside and whispered to him, offering
to vote three times for four dollars, which offer had been accepted.

And now in the union Jurgis met men who explained all this mystery
to him; and he learned that America differed from Russia in that its
government existed under the form of a democracy. The officials who
ruled it, and got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there
were two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and the one
got the office which bought the most votes. Now and then, the election
was very close, and that was the time the poor man came in. In the
stockyards this was only in national and state elections, for in local
elections the Democratic Party always carried everything. The ruler of
the district was therefore the Democratic boss, a little Irishman named
Mike Scully. Scully held an important party office in the state, and
bossed even the mayor of the city, it was said; it was his boast that he
carried the stockyards in his pocket. He was an enormously rich man--he
had a hand in all the big graft in the neighborhood. It was Scully, for
instance, who owned that dump which Jurgis and Ona had seen the first
day of their arrival. Not only did he own the dump, but he owned the
brick factory as well, and first he took out the clay and made it into
bricks, and then he had the city bring garbage to fill up the hole, so
that he could build houses to sell to the people. Then, too, he sold the
bricks to the city, at his own price, and the city came and got them
in its own wagons. And also he owned the other hole near by, where the
stagnant water was; and it was he who cut the ice and sold it; and what
was more, if the men told truth, he had not had to pay any taxes for the
water, and he had built the ice-house out of city lumber, and had not had
to pay anything for that. The newspapers had got hold of that story, and
there had been a scandal; but Scully had hired som