was like coming suddenly upon some wild sight of nature--a mountain
forest lashed by a tempest, a ship tossed about upon a stormy sea.
Jurgis had an unpleasant sensation, a sense of confusion, of disorder,
of wild and meaningless uproar. The man was tall and gaunt, as haggard
as his auditor himself; a thin black beard covered half of his face,
and one could see only two black hollows where the eyes were. He was
speaking rapidly, in great excitement; he used many gestures--he spoke
he moved here and there upon the stage, reaching with his long arms as
if to seize each person in his audience. His voice was deep, like an
organ; it was some time, however, before Jurgis thought of the voice--he
was too much occupied with his eyes to think of what the man was saying.
But suddenly it seemed as if the speaker had begun pointing straight at
him, as if he had singled him out particularly for his remarks; and
so Jurgis became suddenly aware of his voice, trembling, vibrant with
emotion, with pain and longing, with a burden of things unutterable, not
to be compassed by words. To hear it was to be suddenly arrested, to be
gripped, transfixed.

"You listen to these things," the man was saying, "and you say, 'Yes,
they are true, but they have been that way always.' Or you say, 'Maybe
it will come, but not in my time--it will not help me.' And so you
return to your daily round of toil, you go back to be ground up for
profits in the world-wide mill of economic might! To toil long hours
for another's advantage; to live in mean and squalid homes, to work in
dangerous and unhealthful places; to wrestle with the specters of hunger
and privation, to take your chances of accident, disease, and death. And
each day the struggle becomes fiercer, the pace more cruel; each day
you have to toil a little harder, and feel the iron hand of circumstance
close upon you a little tighter. Months pass, years maybe--and then you
come again; and again I am here to plead with you, to know if want and
misery have yet done their work with you, if injustice and oppression
have yet opened your eyes! I shall still be waiting--there is nothing
else that I can do. There is no wilderness where I can hide from these
things, there is no haven where I can escape them; though I travel to
the ends of the earth, I find the same accursed system--I find that all
the fair and noble impulses of humanity, the dreams of poets and the
agonies of martyrs, are shackled and bound in