ife might be dying, his
baby might be starving, his whole family might be perishing in the
cold--and all the while they were ringing their Christmas chimes! And
the bitter mockery of it--all this was punishment for him! They put him
in a place where the snow could not beat in, where the cold could not
eat through his bones; they brought him food and drink--why, in the name
of heaven, if they must punish him, did they not put his family in jail
and leave him outside--why could they find no better way to punish him
than to leave three weak women and six helpless children to starve and
freeze? That was their law, that was their justice!

Jurgis stood upright; trembling with passion, his hands clenched and
his arms upraised, his whole soul ablaze with hatred and defiance. Ten
thousand curses upon them and their law! Their justice--it was a lie, it
was a lie, a hideous, brutal lie, a thing too black and hateful for any
world but a world of nightmares. It was a sham and a loathsome mockery.
There was no justice, there was no right, anywhere in it--it was
only force, it was tyranny, the will and the power, reckless and
unrestrained! They had ground him beneath their heel, they had devoured
all his substance; they had murdered his old father, they had broken and
wrecked his wife, they had crushed and cowed his whole family; and now
they were through with him, they had no further use for him--and because
he had interfered with them, had gotten in their way, this was what they
had done to him! They had put him behind bars, as if he had been a
wild beast, a thing without sense or reason, without rights, without
affections, without feelings. Nay, they would not even have treated a
beast as they had treated him! Would any man in his senses have trapped
a wild thing in its lair, and left its young behind to die?

These midnight hours were fateful ones to Jurgis; in them was the
beginning of his rebellion, of his outlawry and his unbelief. He had no
wit to trace back the social crime to its far sources--he could not say
that it was the thing men have called "the system" that was crushing him
to the earth; that it was the packers, his masters, who had bought up
the law of the land, and had dealt out their brutal will to him from the
seat of justice. He only knew that he was wronged, and that the world
had wronged him; that the law, that society, with all its powers, had
declared itself his foe. And every hour his soul grew blacker, eve