e some who had no legs, and pushed
themselves upon a wheeled platform--some who had been favored with
blindness, and were led by pretty little dogs. Some less fortunate had
mutilated themselves or burned themselves, or had brought horrible sores
upon themselves with chemicals; you might suddenly encounter upon the
street a man holding out to you a finger rotting and discolored with
gangrene--or one with livid scarlet wounds half escaped from their
filthy bandages. These desperate ones were the dregs of the city's
cesspools, wretches who hid at night in the rain-soaked cellars of
old ramshackle tenements, in "stale-beer dives" and opium joints, with
abandoned women in the last stages of the harlot's progress--women who
had been kept by Chinamen and turned away at last to die. Every day
the police net would drag hundreds of them off the streets, and in the
detention hospital you might see them, herded together in a miniature
inferno, with hideous, beastly faces, bloated and leprous with disease,
laughing, shouting, screaming in all stages of drunkenness, barking like
dogs, gibbering like apes, raving and tearing themselves in delirium.

Chapter 24

In the face of all his handicaps, Jurgis was obliged to make the
price of a lodging, and of a drink every hour or two, under penalty of
freezing to death. Day after day he roamed about in the arctic cold,
his soul filled full of bitterness and despair. He saw the world of
civilization then more plainly than ever he had seen it before; a world
in which nothing counted but brutal might, an order devised by those who
possessed it for the subjugation of those who did not. He was one of
the latter; and all outdoors, all life, was to him one colossal prison,
which he paced like a pent-up tiger, trying one bar after another, and
finding them all beyond his power. He had lost in the fierce battle of
greed, and so was doomed to be exterminated; and all society was busied
to see that he did not escape the sentence. Everywhere that he turned
were prison bars, and hostile eyes following him; the well-fed, sleek
policemen, from whose glances he shrank, and who seemed to grip their
clubs more tightly when they saw him; the saloon-keepers, who never
ceased to watch him while he was in their places, who were jealous
of every moment he lingered after he had paid his money; the hurrying
throngs upon the streets, who were deaf to his entreaties, oblivious of
his very existence--and savage