is proposition of course
was, that any one who refused to receive the new gospel was personally
responsible for keeping Jurgis from his heart's desire; and this, alas,
made him uncomfortable as an acquaintance. He met some neighbors with
whom Elzbieta had made friends in her neighborhood, and he set out to
make Socialists of them by wholesale, and several times he all but got
into a fight.

It was all so painfully obvious to Jurgis! It was so incomprehensible
how a man could fail to see it! Here were all the opportunities of the
country, the land, and the buildings upon the land, the railroads, the
mines, the factories, and the stores, all in the hands of a few private
individuals, called capitalists, for whom the people were obliged to
work for wages. The whole balance of what the people produced went to
heap up the fortunes of these capitalists, to heap, and heap again, and
yet again--and that in spite of the fact that they, and every one about
them, lived in unthinkable luxury! And was it not plain that if the
people cut off the share of those who merely "owned," the share of those
who worked would be much greater? That was as plain as two and two makes
four; and it was the whole of it, absolutely the whole of it; and yet
there were people who could not see it, who would argue about everything
else in the world. They would tell you that governments could not manage
things as economically as private individuals; they would repeat and
repeat that, and think they were saying something! They could not see
that "economical" management by masters meant simply that they, the
people, were worked harder and ground closer and paid less! They were
wage-earners and servants, at the mercy of exploiters whose one thought
was to get as much out of them as possible; and they were taking
an interest in the process, were anxious lest it should not be done
thoroughly enough! Was it not honestly a trial to listen to an argument
such as that?

And yet there were things even worse. You would begin talking to some
poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty years, and
had never been able to save a penny; who left home every morning at six
o'clock, to go and tend a machine, and come back at night too tired to
take his clothes off; who had never had a week's vacation in his life,
had never traveled, never had an adventure, never learned anything,
never hoped anything--and when you started to tell him about
Socialism he would