en" Negroes from the cotton districts of
the far South, and they were herded into the packing plants like sheep.
There was a law forbidding the use of buildings as lodging-houses unless
they were licensed for the purpose, and provided with proper windows,
stairways, and fire escapes; but here, in a "paint room," reached only
by an enclosed "chute," a room without a single window and only one
door, a hundred men were crowded upon mattresses on the floor. Up on
the third story of the "hog house" of Jones's was a storeroom, without
a window, into which they crowded seven hundred men, sleeping upon the
bare springs of cots, and with a second shift to use them by day.
And when the clamor of the public led to an investigation into
these conditions, and the mayor of the city was forced to order the
enforcement of the law, the packers got a judge to issue an injunction
forbidding him to do it!

Just at this time the mayor was boasting that he had put an end
to gambling and prize fighting in the city; but here a swarm of
professional gamblers had leagued themselves with the police to fleece
the strikebreakers; and any night, in the big open space in front of
Brown's, one might see brawny Negroes stripped to the waist and pounding
each other for money, while a howling throng of three or four thousand
surged about, men and women, young white girls from the country rubbing
elbows with big buck Negroes with daggers in their boots, while rows of
woolly heads peered down from every window of the surrounding factories.
The ancestors of these black people had been savages in Africa; and
since then they had been chattel slaves, or had been held down by a
community ruled by the traditions of slavery. Now for the first time
they were free--free to gratify every passion, free to wreck themselves.
They were wanted to break a strike, and when it was broken they would be
shipped away, and their present masters would never see them again; and
so whisky and women were brought in by the carload and sold to them, and
hell was let loose in the yards. Every night there were stabbings and
shootings; it was said that the packers had blank permits, which
enabled them to ship dead bodies from the city without troubling the
authorities. They lodged men and women on the same floor; and with
the night there began a saturnalia of debauchery--scenes such as never
before had been witnessed in America. And as the women were the dregs
from the brothels of Chica